Mazur - They cant take that away from me
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They cant take that away from me: summary, description and annotation
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Abstract: In this series of new poems Gail Mazur takes stock-of the complexity of relationships between parents and children, the desires of the body as well as its frailties, the distinctions between memory and history, and the hope of art to capture these seemingly inscrutable realities. By turns mordant and passionate, narrative and meditative, Mazurs poems imply that life, with all of its losses, triumphs, and abrasive intimacies, is far richer and more elaborately metaphorical than poetry can aspire to be-and yet her poems do affectingly recreate this reality. These illuminating poems are the work
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they cant take that away from me
THEY CANT TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME
GAIL MAZUR
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago and London
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made by the author to the following publications in which these poems, some in slightly different versions, first appeared:
Agni Review:Five Poems Entitled Questions (vol. 43), Last Night (vol. 47),
Insomnia at Daybreak (vol. 48), To Giovanni da Pistoia... (vol. 48)
The Alaska Quarterly Review:Not Crying
The Atlantic Monthly: They Cant Take That Away from Me, Young Apple
Tree, December
The Boston Phoenix: Shangri-la
The Colorado Review: Maybe Its Only the Monotony (spring 1996), Right
Now (fall 1994)
Gulf Coast:Penumbra, At the Ear, Nose, and Throat Clinic (twentieth anniversary issue)
The Harvard Review:The Weskit, Twenty Lines before Breakfast
Lingo: Then
Ploughshares: Air Drawing, Girl in a Library
Provincetown Arts:Three Provincetown Mornings, To Begin This Way
Salmagundi: Keep Going, Wakeful before Tests
Slate (www.slate.com): Evening (1995), Low Tide ( 1996), Hypnosis
( 1997), Poems ( 1998). Reprinted with permission. Slateis a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture, and Society: Leahs Dream
TriQuarterly Review: My Dream after Mother Breaks Her Hip
Western Humanities Review:I Wish I Want I Need
Keep Going and Then are included in Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women,ed. Susan Aizenberg and Erin Belieu. Columbia University Press, 2000.
The author wishes to thank the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College for time and space and fellowship.
I
Five Poems Entitled Questions
Questions
What is my purpose in life
if not to peer into the glazed bowl
of silence and fill it for myself
with words? How shall I do it?
The way a disobedient child sings
to herself to keep out the punishing
night, not knowing that her brother
and sister, hearing the song,
shift in their cots of demons
and are solaced into sleep?
Questions
What is my purpose in life
if not to feed myself
with vegetables and herbs
and climb a step machine to nowhere
and breathe deeply to calm myself
and avoid loud noises
and the simmering noon sun?
Isnt there more,
more even than turning to you,
remembering what drew us together,
wondering what will tear us apart?
Does it matter if I tell
my one story again and then again,
changing only a tracing of light,
a bit of fabric, a piece of
laughter, a closed cafeteria
if I add a detail almost every day
of my life, what will I have done?
Who will I give my collections to,
who would want to use them?
Dont answer, dont make me
hang my head
in gratitude or shame.
Questions
What is my purpose in life
if not, when there is nothing to say,
to control myself and say nothing?
What could wisdom be if not
a mastery of waiting and listening?
Is it my purpose to become wise?
What is wisdom? Isnt it a pose,
the will refusing realms of confusion?
How would I approach it, unless
I learned to love the absence of speech,
even the implication of language,
so violently Id remind myself
of a friend who detests the mimes
who gesticulate on Sundays in the park,
and has begun a postcard campaign
to Silence the Silent. She knows
gestures, too, are a part of speech.
Would it have enough meaning for me,
to watch and listen, to touch
the warm fur of animals and the sandy dunes,
to drop handfuls of fine gravel
into the graves of the newly dead,
to learn grief from the mourners tears
and courage from their squared shoulders
as they return, each one alone
to the limousines? What gives anyone
the daring to adore paradoxical life?
Wont I always yearn for and fear an answer?
Will I someday have the one thing to say
that contradicts and clarifies itself,
and without falseness or sorrow,
without strutting or stumbling,
will I know to say it?
Questions
What is my purpose in life
if not to practice goodness
I know isnt graphed in my genes
the way designs are programmed
in the cells of a butterflys wing?
How can I pretend
that the modest beauty of self
lessness is not a false glory?
Why hope altruism is part of me,
set into the elegant machinery
by which form and temperament
are generated? The saints are boring
and fictional, their great acts
accidents of a moment, reactions
to cataclysm. What is goodness?
Havent I tried long enough,
stepped on my own heart, broken
my hands trying to pry it open?
Havent I lain awake, my head
aching with the chronic dementia
of the would-be virtuous? Havent I
settled on my right to be harmless,
nothing better? Didnt I fail
at sacrificing, wasnt the last time
it worked when my son and daughter
still slept in their own messy beds?
Who did they think mothered them,
without rage or tears, with no ideas
of escape? Now they are thrilling
voices on the phone, theyre at home
in the world, they have discrete selves,
there are layers to them, they are like
poems. What will I do from sunrise
to midnight now they dont use me,
why should I take on anyones pain?
How will I live if I wont care
for anything in this world again
more than I care for myself?
Questions
What is my purpose in life
now that its too late for regret,
now that Ive apologized
to the murdered dead and the ones
who went with tubes & needles
on ungiving rubberized beds
and the ones who left glowing,
lovers holding their thin cold hands,
compassionate angels hovering
in the sweetish light of candles,
snow folding itself gently outside
over the dry summer gardens,
soothing the streetlights
and the angular cars, and hydrants?
What can I want now but to be
solitary in a white cell,
with only a mattress and table,
my soul simplifying as Thoreau
advised? I know Ill want one thing
on my wall, a framed poem of Li Pos,
the Chinese characters say the moon
is making him homesick, drunk and lonely,
Ill want 5 things on my table:
a block of woven paper; a brush;
a stone brush rest in the shape
of the 4 sacred mountains;
Ill want to look at a Chinese rock,
small and violent like my soul,
mountainous as the landscape
of Guilin, vertical jade hairpins;
and then, a gold and red pagoda,
a ceramic music box
when I wind a key, it will play
a folk song Ive heard only once
on ancient instruments years ago
as I sat on a carved bench
watching huge golden carp
swimming madly in the miniature lake
of a scholars garden in Suzhou;
it will play in perfect time
for a while until it winds slowly
down, and then the dying song
will pull me mercifully back
to my calm, impenitent room.
II
Maybe Its Only the Monotony
of these long scorching days
but today my daughter
is truly exasperating
Stop it!I shoutor Ill
and I twist her little pinked arm
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