Gail Mazur
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Gail Mazur’s recent book, Zeppo’s First Wife: New & Selected Poems, (Chicago, 2005) is winner of the 2006 Massachusetts Book Award, a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. She is author of 4 earlier books of poetry, Nightfire, The Pose of Happiness, The Common, and They Can’t Take That Away from Me (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001.
She is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College and Founding Director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, a weekly poetry reading series she ran for 29 years.
Mazur was a fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and the 2005 recipient of the St. Botolph Club Foundation’s Distinguished Artist Award. An interview with Mazur about her work is online at The Atlantic. She and her husband, the artist Michael Mazur, live in Cambridge and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she serves on the Writing Committee, the Board of Trustees, and the Summer Program Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center. She is an Advisory Editor to Agni, Ploughshares, and The Boston Review.
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LITTLE TEMPEST
Does it make you more philosophical to sit there
watching the tide come in and finally go back out?
And in between, when you swim in the fluggy bay,
are you gone from me, floating in astral space?
From our room, I watch you gazing inward
while I turn the pages of The Catastrophe Daily.
It might calm me if you’d come into the house
a minute—you, in the splintery Adirondack chair.
And when the hurricane that’s been predicted comes?
Please remember, the last one blew the motel roof
into our neighbor’s house, a whole lived-in story
with bedrooms and hall lights gone in a minute;
a young woman stood on the moor, letting swirling sands
lacerate her hands and face—the next morning
did she feel safe, indestructible, strolling raw-faced
around the broken dresser drawers, the backless rocker,
the aqua toilet seat? Did she know a man had just died
on that sidewalk, while she was out defying the gods?
Everyone was out strolling, everyone seemed pleased
in the aftermath. That cold clear light. Please come in,
tell me our danger’s over, a short story, a passing
disaster. I’m not philosophical, my mind sticks
in its minute, replaying its feverish fears—
little tempest, where can it go, what can it think
it hasn’t thought before?
QUEENIE
What was a horse but a colossal
machine that sped away with me, so
finally I hung by one foot from one
stirrup and bounced along the gravel?
I’d thought I knew to make her canter
but I was dragged and scraped over
the country road, not thinking, feeling
This is It, nothing ahead for me but hurt
and blood and ugliness—Who was that
Queenie, graceful chestnut giantess,
retiree from a circus, rescued
from the glue factory or saved from
being horsemeat by the kindly father
of my friend Janet, what deliverer
of knowledge, that she—so soulful when
her huge teeth snarked an apple from my hand
could, in one instant, catapult me,
a dauntless child of ten, from that morning
to this day I steer our car across a bridge
to your hospital, this brutal day I need
no brilliant doctor to tell me what comes
with the terrain, to say there’ll be no one to
lift me from the ground, to carry me to
the stable, to bring me uninjured home.
YOUNG APPLE TREE, DECEMBER
What you want for it what you’d want
for a child: that she take hold;
that her roots find home in stony
winter soil; that she take seasons
in stride, seasons that shape and
reshape her; that like a dancer’s,
her limbs grow pliant, graceful
and surprising; that she know,
in her branchings, to seek balance;
that she know when to flower, when
to wait for the returns; that she turn
to a giving sun; that she know to share
fruit as it ripens, that what’s lost
to her will be replaced; that early
summer afternoons, a full blossoming
tree, she cast lacy shadows; that change
not frighten her, rather change
meet her embrace; that remembering
her small history, she find her place
in an orchard; that she be her own
orchard; that she outlast you;
that she prepare for the hungry world,
the fallen world, the loony world,
something shapely, useful, new, delicious.
