Ben Mazer is always an Eyewear favourite and here the Boston poet of flamboyant brilliance offers us a new poem:
Orphans
The splintered
gutter’s cool refreshing pools
of mud’s perspective
shatter shadowed noon,
having rejected all
philosophy,
its one objective
downward to the sea;
the poet’s pants in
tatters, and a flower
in bramble coat of
mould, deflect who see
in crossing, but the
radiant queen
bestows her museship
on the violent seer;
these orphans drink
their vodka and they gleam
to be descending
further than the fold,
past every trinket of
the common household,
where tufts of
marigolds gleam in the wind,
that signify the sea;
quick steps rescind
the future and the
present, but the past,
at last familiar,
asserts its precedence
where clotted loss
builds out of a mixed tense,
the secret intimacy
orphans clasp
to one another, to
propagate a myth.
There’s no way back
from what they carry with.
new poem by Ben Mazer; copyright 2013. First published at Eyewear today.
Comments