Doodling

Ionarts is happy to continue bringing more original poetry, kindly contributed by Frederick Pollack, author of The Adventure and Happiness, both book-length narrative poems, and whose shorter works have appeared in literary magazines such as The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, Orbis UK, and the Munich-based Die Gazette. This is his second poem on ionarts, following Parents of the Just Man, published in March.

Doodling Worlds, continents, innocent of Mercator. All coastline. Isthmuses, fjords. Archipelagoes spanning hemispheres. Cozy seas; improbable spatter of lakes. Deserts relegated to the picturesque blank center. No axial tilt; endlessly cool forests. Peninsulas. And always north, two-thirds of the way north (always the east coast) – home. Perhaps for a moment I chopped wood, gardened a lifetime, somehow finding time to be. (At least a generator; sometimes robots.) Then a meandering road south to town. Windowboxes, the people gentle, subtle and unboring. (How could they be made like that?) And I stayed with them, crosshatching streets, till re-expelled by what I was ignoring. by Frederick Pollack