FRED POLLACK

★ ★ ★ ★

POETRY

The Rime of the Ancient Spaceman

There are places you can breathe
an earth hour; then the metals
build up in your blood, and your shots can’t handle
the bugs. There are bars
where the equivalent of booze
is tea. Or acid. You can find a park bench
that wasn’t made for you. And then,
in some places absolutely
everything is religion.

A guy I know was the occasion
for a vast self-immolation.
Moody telepaths found him impossible.
The locals never think you’re
a god, or pretty,
or smell good if you remove the suit.
And some are intolerably snooty
if they perceive you at all.
You may not want them to.

So you admire the canyons, the suns and moons,
the walking plants, mistrustful sea. Rock, layers
of rock are always a breath of home
or vice versa.
And then you go back to the ship.
From space the stars are merely stars.
You’re spared the illusion of sunset,
dawn, and that anyone
beside your sullen species

has time for you or any sort of time.
The corridors are clean; the A.I.,
sweet and sardonic, knows you very well.
The less interaction, it says,
the less guilt. But also,
of course, less opportunity
to sell someone trinkets,
upgrade our tech, or chance at last upon
the fair maiden of the spaceways.

Amen

Among the posthumous papers
of the astronomer Frank Drake, a new version
of the ontological proof:
If They don’t show up, it means They don’t care
or don’t exist, which is another way
of not caring.
Shrines begin to appear
in intellectual homes. It’s actually
a designer, not an architect,
who works out the décor: one
distressed wall, faint smell of
insecticide or disinfectant, candles.
(“Candles per se,” he says, “are the faith of an atheist.”)
For hours you imagine
something like a squid
with hearts of gold and precisely nothing
to say. The trick
is to bear that stillness
outside with you among the lights and sirens.