The Aral Sea*****
Estill Pollock‘s first pamphlet selection of poems, Metaphysical Graffiti, was published in England. This was followed by a principal collection, Constructing the Human (Poetry Salzburg), which was later developed into the book cycle, Blackwater Quartet. Between 2005-11, in collaboration with Cinnamon Press in Wales, he published a second major book cycle, Relic Environments Trilogy. His latest collection, Entropy is published by Broadstone Books (2021) in the United States. A native of Kentucky, he has lived in England for forty years.
*****
Estill Pollock: Poem
THE HIGH GROUND
Hothouse climates, bleached
pastures more Tunisia than Kent—drought
the way of things now, except
the flood that undermined the bridge
to town, the rains that rained
as though to make a point.
*
The hazy churn at the sewage outfall
tags rivers where we fished
for trout—runaway weather holding us
for ransom: yellow fogs, plastic
archipelagos, or frogs falling biblically
by the hundredweight.
*
Someone sold the moon, patented
the light of stars to run the lawnmower
for a year, or calculate
the bile of the electorate towards anyone
suggesting tax on redneck tropes
and idlers like me.
*
The life you had—rice paper
to a flame: the earth will shrug us off
indifferent to our preferences
for sex on pay-to-view—all devices
locked, as permanent
as passcodes to the Pliocene.
*
What is mine, is yours, but think again
before you sign—ghettos of gated
golf retreats, or the grind
of punch-clock jobs twinned
with boring towns and jail routines,
all, a carousel of filtered Zoom.
*
Rare varieties of daffodils, or carrots,
or dogs with barks bred out,
or laws redacted until just a final
question mark remains—some kid
in Uzbekistan writes code for cash
or country, for scenes repeated here.
*
A sliding scale of faith,
or doubt, divides demagogues
from Defenders of the Faith, or fusion drives
from water droplets in a Martian cave.
Markets heave and settle, money
for Egyptian flax or hypersonic flights.
*
Embargos on silicon chips, numinous
technologies or Gucci—a market blacker
than your heart elevates the status
of chancers in Armani suits, their pockets
deep enough for launch codes
and the votes to swing things Right.
*
Shares in Ford Motors, in EVs
or a driverless sublime, catatonic modes
of hypertext dysfunction behind
your eyes, and mine—solemn registries
of data transferred like
hogs to abattoirs; so it goes.
*
A film, its provenance pre-Internet,
Mesmerises—you, marvelling anyone
survived an hour without an URL to codify
existence, while the password sentry
mocks you to your face, a bot
tagged No Reply to queries.
*
The new reactors sat mute as spuds,
ignition compromised—the contractors
foreign, the Minister’s misgivings
rising to a sweat, his name front page
with junkets to desert kingdoms bristling
now with tactical nukes, terrorist flags.
*
The list of citizens eligible
to vote included names of people dead
twenty years, their pets and the guy
police arrested in a passport scam.
The candidates agreed, more should be done,
in camera, after the election.
*
Rousseau proposed therapy
for aristos weary of venison and imported
sweetmeats, formulaic plays
about mistaken genders and buffoons
on thrones—the therapy involved
the starving poor, shaping trees with knives.
*
The dancer Lucia, daughter
of James Joyce, diagnosed schizophrenic:
her poems, a novel and treatment notes
destroyed—she, locked up in Northampton
fifty years, her father’s poor eyesight
it is said, symptomatic of syphilis.
*
The blockbuster movie, its budget
bigger than Bulgaria’s GDP, shot
on location—except the scenes with actors,
historic shop fronts and the Rhine—voted
dull by audiences, who
knew their green screens from their cash.
*
In the floods, houses dismantled—
white trash towns and trees
and upturned cars, people clinging
to scrap timber they used to live in.
They waved to us, shouting about
rescue we knew would never come.
*
At the UN there was a meeting
about a meeting, and twenty-seven
Under Secretaries arranged early lunch
with their counterparts, to agree
agendas, mistranslated later
as demands for tin and territory.
*
No one dared repeat the rumour
the Leader was dead, should the rumour
prove false—the paradox being, that
to speak of it implied a preference
for conditions of change, and only
in death are we granted such freedoms.
*
The chess tournament ended
with accusations of misconduct,
viz.a technical sweep of the room
found devices clearly intended to affect
an outcome at odds with those
secreted by their own security.
*
Melville’s sea, or the drawing rooms
of Henry James—not real, only
parables of misdirection, with Poe
the only American we took to heart—
literature a lonely place: blank
pages, a kiss beneath a paper moon.
*
The martyrs queued hours
for a place to rest their heads, most
with no idea about their crimes—religion
and politics, the heretical or merely
dim: torture and the axe
a validation of Church and State.
*
Wagnerian heroines, stripped
of saga accoutrements, are more like
Madame Bovary, their problems
petty, familiar to any Parisian decadent—
so Nietzsche claimed, his ideas
about women never far from the asylum.
*
In ancient times, wicker totems
and standing stones crowded for attention,
until a woman living in isolated leisure
learned the trick of potions
and the gift of drowsy cuckolds:
from her kitchen garden, dynasties.
*
If only Socrates was less dreary,
Reason might answer for itself,
without the pathological conditioning
of Greeks in dirty robes: obscure desires,
dichotomies of Virtue, pale boys
buggered behind the statues.
*
The landless knight, a fixture
of the Middle Ages, tolerated in Provence
for his courtesy and war skills, drifted
place to place, his armour repaired
in exchange for siege tales,
and lute songs for other men’s wives.
*
Martin Luther valued piety,
and after much reflection concluded
Catholics considered all men rascals,
while the Protestants nursed
psychoses of Death and Resurrection—
one, a dare to sin, the other, stale bread.
*
Kafka considered the Day of Judgment
a misnomer—the term suggesting
titanic waves of fire and heraldries
in sequences of gotcha—instead,
more like a parish council
reviewing the state of local ditches.
*
We should make for the high ground,
beyond the melted Alps, beyond
the cities on the plain, the trickle creeks
now deltas of the floating world.
If someone arrives before us, let it be
Dante, who valued Love, and scansion.
*
Tomorrow shall be my dancing day,
reads the English carol, a song
about the soul, leaping—prayers
to Venus or the Virgin sentiment only:
against a fearful afterlife
those high kicks a hard act to follow.
The High Window 