GAS Featured Poet: Frederick Pollack

 

Frederick Pollack is author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), and four collections, A POVERTY OF WORDS (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023), and THE LIBERATOR (Survision Books, Ireland, 2024). Many other poems in print and online journals. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.

In the Walls

They were in prison under Putin,

then via miracle

came here; are eventually

imprisoned again under Trump,

freed by a larger miracle. That’s when I meet them.

Her English is better than his but she seldom speaks;

her response to camp conditions was

to become a listener. 

Ravaged smile. He, moon-faced, talks readily,

not only about his continuing, death-defying 

activism but a moment in prison when,

at last, he slept. On the verge

of waking he heard, perhaps a fart, perhaps

a curse from a cellmate, a cry

from above, and perceived them not

as sounds from reality but creaks and footfalls

from the corridors behind

this world. Where gods no smarter than we, 

less in fact but immortal, stumble

endlessly forward, sometimes blundering

into our realm where they, by accident,

do mostly ill.

Those Russians are the sort of friends 

I might have had if my life had been more … 

dynamic. I invented them and project 

experiences onto them because

they’re less averse than I to “spiritual” topics,

and because they’re more important.

Blockage

As isolation spreads, the existence of

a spirit world becomes harder and harder

to deny. Some of the living 

are glad their parents are back (and more

connected, for the most part, than before);

some are horrified. And when it’s

kids who return – well, 

of course one’s overjoyed (although 

they’re always in a sense “special needs”).

Welcome for spouses, friends, siblings

depends on the specifics of relationships. 

There’s a return to family, often very extended.

Conservatives especially value it.

One opinion, hard to articulate, is that

what all this reveals is disappointing. 

Whether believed in or not, the afterlife offered

change, perhaps improvement, at least clarity.

Now we learn that everyone 

just wants to come (back) here.

These clouds of dead are merely (though only

hard-right podcasters say it) immigrants …

There’s also the problem 

of ghosts who return to the wrong place.

One showed up at my place.

Seemed slow, insisted I was someone else,

then began to apologize. 

This was early on; I’m afraid I let 

the pressure we were all under show.

Now, years later, I

wander, trying to find 

him or someone who knew him, say I’m sorry.