New Poetry by Fred Pollack

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).