Frederick Pollack
Downturn
He had to sell the place in town
whose flat roof he still sees
through binoculars. For years he meant
to sit there of an evening, watching the boats;
hadn’t. Now his wife
can’t buy new things to wear for him
and evanescing friends, nor
his daughters collect glances on
the seafront. What remains
are the house in the hills, a cook
who talks to herself (some afternoons
the only living sound),
and objects waiting to leave.
The look he gets from ancestral portraits
was always there; he counters it by knowing
that no one will want them. The girls
sulk on their phones, the wife …
The crash has cleared the docks and swept
tour buses from the harbor road.
Heretofore the gaze of strangers he
disdained had validated him;
now, with those multiple absences,
he feels an irritating brotherhood.
Manfred
Other worlds are different: migration is welcome.
If you can get there, society (whatever it is)
will bend and change to accommodate you while
assuming you’re changed by its love.
Across the galaxies, the plural universes,
compassion is both common and an art.
Only Earth is mean. (Iceland, Africa,
the shores of the Pacific break apart; is it
the movement of plates or nausea at the taste
of humans?) And, elsewhere, the migrant
perhaps most cherished is the one who can’t
explain his exile in the usual ways.
Who expects, in fact, no pity, only
blame. Who might have sought supernatural
forgiveness or penance or simply terms
for himself, but in a cosmos without
metaphysics must stumble
from world to world trying to explain.
To a sexless race how he was mean
to his mother. To telepaths how he was manipulative,
secretive. To confess vanity
to machines running mildly down, and loneliness
to a hive. Everywhere he meets
with listeners who would listen for eternity,
but he can’t bear eternity and leaves.
For other worlds where he must also
live in special quarters furnished
with his atmosphere, pressure, food, gravity,
language and fluids. What he notices about
each host (far more than how they look) is
their poverty, though they seldom perceive it
as such; only Earth is rich.
Though the others begrudge him nothing,
death might be cheaper for all concerned.
