Everyone Was Nice

It should be annoying but isn’t,
that even here we’re collected
in comfortable rooms and sorted,
then carry documents
along sometimes the wrong but always
pleasant corridors to smaller rooms
and groups. We’re reminded
of the welfare states we were born in
and which at least a number of us hoped
would return. An idealized version –
for the ubiquitous officials
who help us to the right place are all young
and never seem annoyed or condescend.

A loose circle, couches;
decent coffee and pastries. We tell,
as expected, our stories.
It takes a while to grasp the common thread,
and not everyone does, because
it isn’t a thread but the whole cloth.
For this group life isn’t one thing after
another – which is easier to deal with, or
not – but one thing. Which
the incidents we crowdedly
recount (mine, I’ll admit,
the pettiest and most diffuse)
reveal … So that when

we’ve finished, and the pastries
and coffee are all gone, we
stare at each other with no idea
what to do; the room, as it were,
is full of monuments or philosophical
systems … We should admire, I think –
critique, polish – but all we manage
is silence. At which the officials,
who somehow receded, seem more visible.
They had better (the consensus is)
not ask us to relinquish those
statues; it would be
worse than what they’ve done with our bodies.

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press. Three collections of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS, (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), and THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, September 2023). Pollack has appeared in Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, etc.  Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire  Review, Mudlark, Rat’s Ass Review,  Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Big Windows Review (2020, ‘21), etc. Website: www.frederickpollack.com.