Gail Mazur

I say to the named granite stone, to the brown grass, to the dead chrysanthemums,Mother, I still have a body, what else could receive my mind's transmissions, its dots and dashes of pain

He reminds me of someone I used to know, but who? Before class, he comes to my office to shmooze, a thousand thousand pointless interesting speculations. Irrepressible boy, his assignments are rarely completed, or actually started. This week, instead of research in the stacks, he’s performing with a reggae band that didn’t exist last week. Kids danced to his music and stripped, he tells me gleefully, high spirit of the street festival. He’s the singer, of course— why ask if he studied an instrument? On the brink of graduating with an engineering degree (not, it turned out, his forte), he switched to English, his second language. It’s hard to swallow the bravura of his academic escapes or tell if the dark eyes laugh with his face. Once, he brought me a tiny persimmon he’d picked on campus; once, a poem about an elderly friend in New Delhi who left him volumes of Tagore and memories of avuncular conversation. My encouragement makes him skittish— it doesn’t suit his jubilant histrionics of despair. And I remember myself shrinking from enthusiasm or praise, the prospect of effort-drudgery. Success—a threat. A future, we figure, of revision—yet what can the future be but revision and repair? Now, on the brink again, graduation’s postponed, the brilliant thesis on Walker Percy unwritten. “I’ll drive to New Orleans and soak it up and write my paper in a weekend,” he announces in the Honors office. And, “I want to be a bum in daytime and a reggae star at night!” What could I give him from my life or art that matters, how share the desperate slumber of my early years, the flashes of inspiration and passion in a life on hold? If I didn’t fool myself or anyone, no one could touch me, or tell me much . . . This gloomy Houston Monday, he appears at my door, so sunny I wouldn’t dare to wake him now, or say it matters if he wakes at all. “Write a poem about me!” he commands, and so I do.

—1509 I've already grown a goiter from this torture, hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy (or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison). My stomach's squashed under my chin, my beard's pointing at heaven, my brain's crushed in a casket, my breast twists like a harpy's. My brush, above me all the time, dribbles paint so my face makes a fine floor for droppings! My haunches are grinding into my guts, my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight, every gesture I make is blind and aimless. My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's all knotted from folding over itself. I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow. Because I'm stuck like this, my thoughts are crazy, perfidious tripe: anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe. My painting is dead. Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor. I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.

of these long scorching days but today my daughter is truly exasperating— Stop it! I shout—or I’ll— and I twist her little pinked arm slowly, calibrating my ferocity— You can’t hurt me you can’t hurt me! She’s so defiant, glowering, glaring at me— but frightened, her eyes bright with tears— See, I’m not even crying! I see. But it’s the angel of extermination I see, shining in his black trappings, and turning ecstatically toward him, a little Jewish girl tempts him to play his game of massacre. —after Vittorio Sereni

On the telephone, friends mistake us now when we first say hello—not after. And that oddly optimistic lilt we share nourishes my hopes: we do sound happy. . . . Last night, in my dream’s crib, a one-day infant girl. I wasn’t totally unprepared— there was the crib, and cotton kimonos, not just a padded dresser drawer. And then, I knew I could drive to the store for the tiny, funny clothes my daughter wears. I was in a familiar room and leaned over the rail, crooning Hello, and the smiling baby— she’d be too young for speech, I know, or smiles— gurgled back at me,Hullo. —If I could begin again, I’d hold her longer, closer! Maybe that way, when night opens into morning, and all my windows gape at the heartbreaking street, my dreams wouldn’t pierce so, I wouldn’t hold my breath at the parts of my life still in hiding, my childhood’s white house where I lunged toward the flowers of love as if I were courting death. . . . Over the crib, a mobile was spinning, bright birds going nowhere, primary colors, primary as mothering once seemed. . . . Later, I wonder why I dreamt that dream, yearning for what I’ve had, and have why it was my mother’s room, the blonde moderne bedroom set hidden under years of junk—a spare room’s the nicest way to put it, though now all her crowded rooms are spare—

Clarice, the Swiss Appraiser, paces our rooms, listing furnishings on her yellow legal pad with a Waterman pen, a microcamera. Although I've asked why we have to do this, I forgot the answer. The answer to why is because, inscrutable, outside of logic, helpless, useless because. Wing chairs, a deco lamp, my mother's cherry dining table—nothing we both loved using looks tragic. Most nights now I sit in the den reading the colorful spines of your art books, Fra Angelico to Zurburan, volume after volume of Balthus, Botticelli, Cezanne, Degas, Michelangelo, Monet, Titian, Velasquez. Friends. An art school's asked for them— after all, they have no "real" value now, except to me.... Upstairs, Cerise—is that her name?—gasps at the bentwood chaise, the blonde moderne bedroom "set" my parents bought on their two-day Depression honeymoon in Manhattan. I know this has something to do with paying taxes. Last night, a real icy February zero, I went out to start the engine of the car you gave me on my birthday, to keep it going, then came in and forgot it till this morning. I woke to the city's recycling truck grinding my papers and plastic bottles and my motor running. And still, I wasn't out of gas, Our neighbor, his head in a red bandana, yelled, "We didn't want to bother you at one in the morning!" and I thought,How did you know I wasn't in there, suiciding? Cerise means "cherry," Clarice means "light" or "famous"— is her name Clarissa? What is she saying? She's blurring, she looks like a Candice, she looks nice enough, but I'll defer judgement until she's finished this business. If I let on I felt sad, remember my mother's advice? "Everyone should collect something!" That was her path to the purpose-driven life, along rows of a flea market, then alone in her house jammed with the nicked, the chipped, ceramics with dings, the inscribed wedding bands of strangers— damaged things that always needed gluing or polishing. I tried not to teach our children the world's a dangerous place, but there we were, four of us, plunked into history, listening to Dylan. Then, two of us. Our son and daughter out in it, unafraid, purposeful.... Somehow, life veered from the script. I should get a new cell phone, but eighteen of your messages are in/on my old one and can't be transferred. How can Verizon say your voice isn't really in there at all, calling home to me?—Then where is it? Why should it disappear from somewhere is unapparently isn't? Why should my living here be so metaphysical? Callista enters our bedroom, the room sacrosanct to me, off-limits, but no matter. She scans our night tables, our TV, our pills and lotions and clippers. Oh, morning here you'd perform what you'd call your "ablutions" while I read the paper in bed. Pearl slinks from her place on my pillow, Bogey's hunched in the clothes closer on your shearling slippers, Hosni Mubarak's been deposed, Benghazi's a riot of freedom until the Khadaffis say it isn't. The day you died,  I knew what people meant by saying the earth stopped spinning on its axis. No choice but to write myself, to keep going. Today's Science Times s ays we're not in the Garden of Eden anymore— well, that shouldn't give evolutionary biologists pause. Life, says the geologists, is a natural consequence of geology. Geology? I know there's got to be more to be written. Clarissa, Clarinda, Career, whatever your name is, pack up your digital camera, your officious watery pen, your scrutineer's notepad, you're in the wrong biosphere, your data will never add up—Clarity, I think we're done here.

Hot hot hot, you are hot, Sun, Glaring all over my east window Burning, beaming, yellowing The room. Uninterested in me Because I'm not Mayakovsky Although I feel you insisting I wake, that I produce right now Or perish as my uncle used to say. Brave Mayakovsky, doomed Mayakovsky, He could sass you, and later O'Hara (Before they turned forty, both gone) Sassed you and sassed Mayakovsky, too— But when I try I know it's just another Instance of me whistling in the dark, Me not blazing, me not burning out.

I’d dislocated my life, so I went to the zoo. It was December but it wasn’t December. Pansies just planted were blooming in well-groomed beds. Lovers embraced under the sky’s Sunday blue. Children rode around and around on pastel trains. I read the labels stuck on every cage the way people at museums do, art being less interesting than information. Each fenced-in plot had a map, laminated with a stain to tell where in the world the animals had been taken from. Rhinos waited for rain in the rhino-colored dirt, too grief-struck to move their wrinkles, their horns too weak to ever be hacked off by poachers for aphrodisiacs. Five white ducks agitated the chalky waters of a duck pond with invisible orange feet while a little girl in pink ruffles tossed pork rinds at their disconsolate backs. This wasn’t my life! I’d meant to look with the wise tough eye of exile, I wanted not to anthropomorphize, not to equate, for instance, the lemur’s displacement with my displacement. The arched aviary flashed with extravagance, plumage so exuberant, so implausible, it seemed cartoonish, and the birdsongs unintelligible, babble, all their various languages unravelling— no bird can get its song sung right, separated from models of its own species. For weeks I hadn’t written a sentence, for two days I hadn’t spoken to an animate thing. I couldn’t relate to a giraffe— I couldn’t look one in the face. I’d have said, if anyone had asked, I’d been mugged by the Gulf climate. In a great barren space, I watched a pair of elephants swaying together, a rhythm too familiar to be mistaken, too exclusive. My eyes sweated to see the bull, his masterful trunk swinging, enter their barn of concrete blocks, to watch his obedient wife follow. I missed the bitter tinny Boston smell of first snow, the huddling in a cold bus tunnel. At the House of Nocturnal Mammals, I stepped into a furtive world of bats, averted my eyes at the gloomy dioramas, passed glassed-in booths of lurking rodents— had I known I’d find what I came for at last? How did we get here, dear sloth, my soul, my sister? Clinging to a tree-limb with your three-toed feet, your eyes closed tight, you calm my idleness, my immigrant isolation. But a tiny tamarin monkey who shares your ersatz rainforest runs at you, teasing, until you move one slow, dripping, hairy arm, then the other, the other, the other, pulling your tear-soaked body, its too-few vertebrae, its inferior allotment of muscles along the dead branch, going almost nowhere slowly as is humanly possible, nudged by the bright orange primate taunting, nipping, itching at you all the time, like ambition.

In the warming house, children lace their skates, bending, choked, over their thick jackets. A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy it’s hard to imagine why anyone would leave, clumping across the frozen beach to the river. December’s always the same at Ware’s Cove, the first sheer ice, black, then white and deep until the city sends trucks of men with wooden barriers to put up the boys’ hockey rink. An hour of skating after school, of trying wobbly figure-8’s, an hour of distances moved backwards without falling, then—twilight, the warming house steamy with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs aching. Outside, the hockey players keep playing, slamming the round black puck until it’s dark, until supper. At night, a shy girl comes to the cove with her father. Although there isn’t music, they glide arm in arm onto the blurred surface together, braced like dancers. She thinks she’ll never be so happy, for who else will find her graceful, find her perfect, skate with her in circles outside the emptied rink forever?

The black kitten cries at her bowl meek meek and the gray one glowers from the windowsill. My hand on the can to serve them. First day of spring. Yesterday I drove my little mother for hours through wet snow. Her eightieth birthday. What she wanted was that ride with me— shopping, gossiping, mulling old grievances, 1930, 1958, 1970. How cruel the world has been to her, how uncanny she’s survived it. In her bag, a birthday card from “my Nemesis,” signed Sincerely with love—