Christiania *
Silly to be reading the guidebook
on a bench in waning light ...
All day the sun had never quite escaped
the clouds. But he was struck
by the image of a town burning,
and the king and everyone
fleeing up here, then descending to contrive
this city. He had been to the island
where the rich lived; would remember
the statue of a little girl
with her bicycle, alone and safe
yet somehow brave, and an allée;
but the houses had seemed merely those
of the rich. He had gone to see
the Viking ship in its museum, but either
it was under maintenance or he had
the wrong day; he wouldn’t recall, later;
that sort of thing happened to him often.
It seemed a tough town. Not like Naples,
Hamburg, other places he had been,
but busy, beery, hard-working,
its pastel houses built of wood for winter.
At the Vigeland park the unvarying, stocky
stylization of the grey
figures overrode maternity, courage,
grief, strength, whatever quality
each meant, which seemed to show
an inadvertent insight. Briefly the sun came out;
lovers strolled and hugged. I’ve always been
a thief of others’ high moments,
he thought. It was a line from a novel.
Then up here at the Fortress
he had stood a long time
in the Museum of the Resistance
before a replicated cell with figures
of an SS-man and a resistant
about to get down to business;
and the wall with gracious thanks,
in English and gold letters, to the Allies.
Closing his book, he may have thought
that sentimentality derives
its energy from a tenderness
applied to oneself, which at some level
one knows should be applied to others.
At that point, the sun slipped
below the cloud-layer. The whole long fjord
between its mountains gleamed. The full
and ancient trees, some growing through
the battlements, turned gold-on-green,
the ivied brick of walls a golden red.
The old-world cannon seemed alive, but not
with threat, only some loyalty. Along
the shadowed paths, couples
and solitary people walked and met.
It’s possible, he may have said aloud.
For me. And rose and walked. He was 35.
- © Fred Pollack 2022
Author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press. Two collections of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS, (Prolific Press, 2015) and LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). 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, etc.
* Christiania, capital of the Kingdom of Norway, changed its name to Oslo in 1925 (editor's note).
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