Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems

by Gail Mazur

Overview

from Enormously Sad
. . . Sad, so sad-compared to what?
To your earlier more oblivious state?
It never was oblivious enough-
always those presentiments of sadness
prickling the limbic. Now a voice says, Get outside
yourself, go walk on the flats. The tide's gone out—
but your little metal detector will detect little metallic coins
of enormous sadness in the teeming wet sand,
and then, the tide will come back, erasing, cleansing!
And you, standing there in the salty scouring air-
will you still be enormously sad,
While the other world, outside your tiny purview, struck
by iron, reels? World of intentional iron, pure savage
organized iron of the world, it hasn't the time
that you have for your puny enormous sadness.

Widely acclaimed for expanding the stylistic boundaries of both the narrative and meditative lyric, Gail Mazur’s poetry crackles with verbal invention as she confronts the inevitable upheavals of a lived life. Zeppo’s First Wife, which includes excerpts from Mazur’s four previous books, as well as twenty-two new poems, is epitomized by the worldly longing of the title poem, with its searching poignancy and comic bravura. Mazur’s explorations of “this fallen world, this loony world” are deeply moving acts of empathy by a singular moral sensibility—evident from the earliest poem included here, the much-anthologized “Baseball,” a stunning bird’s-eye view of human foibles and passions. Clear-eyed, full of paradoxical griefs and appetites, her poems brave the most urgent subjects—from the fraught luscious Eden of the ballpark, to the fragility of our closest human ties, to the implications for America in a world where power and war are cataclysmic for the strong as well as the weak.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226514475
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/01/2005
Series:	Phoenix Poets
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Gail Mazur is the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry series and the author of six previous books of poems, including They Can’t Take That Away from Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Insitute of Radcliffe College as well as the St. Botolph Club Foundation Distinguished Artist Award.

Read an Excerpt

ZEPPO'S FIRST WIFE
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

By GAIL MAZUR THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2005
The University of Chicago
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-51447-5


Chapter One Enormously Sad

What a small feeling the phrase enormously sad alludes to this morning-a child has turned away, or, you sense defeat, the grief and defeat of disappointed love, failed friendships, defeat of work come to nothing. Grief and defeat pervade the kitchen, the bedroom, the walk downstairs to the laundry, pervade the basket of unloved socks and charmless underwear, and the arms holding the basket, and the feet feeling blindly for the unreliable old steps. Enormously sad, this unwanted quiet's suffused with it, not the quietude you've surely yearned for, not a solitude elected, the cell with favorite books, savory meals left at the door, occasional nocturnal visits (but that would compromise the solitude, wouldn't it?) Sad, so sad-compared to what? To your earlier more oblivious state? It never was oblivious enough- always those presentiments of sadness prickling the limbic. Now a voice says, Get outside yourself, go walk on the flats. The tide's gone out- but your little metal detector will detect little metallic coins of enormous sadness in the teeming wet sand, and then, the tide will come back, erasing, cleansing! And you, standing there in the salty scouring air- will you still be enormously sad, while the other world, outside your tiny purview, struck by iron, reels? World of intentional iron, pure savage organized iron of the world, it hasn't the time that you have for your puny enormous sadness.

Blue Umbrella

Deer Isle

Kai says, "Here, let me fix that, you don't know how." This elegant mechanism, a present from my daughter, topped by its own wind hat, engineered not to turn inside out in nor'easters or August hurricanes. Ingenious invention of China and Egypt, emblem of rank in remote antiquity, collapsible shade, pampering portable sunscreen at least a millennium before a damp Brit eureka'd the thought of keeping dry. Bishop's Crusoe fashioned one on his desolate island, had "such a time" remembering the way the ribs would go. Palpable perfection centuries in the making. Cobalt canopy I left sprung open to dry outdoors, away from the library's waxed floors. A courtesy, I thought, and someone's shoved it into a railing, so one of the little wooden caps that tip the steel ribs and hold the water-proofed cloth taut, has split. Now there's a gap in my assurance of shelter. Ruined, ruined, I think-my small losses resound in me today as titanic griefs-but Kai- who makes his art from what you might call nothing- toothpicks, mussel shells, buttons, discarded books, garlic stems-who'll find anywhere, in Toronto or Kowloon or at this island's dump swap shop, the raw ingredients of his dreamy constructions, Kai, who knows I'm not "skillful with my hands" yet hasn't turned from me, Kai, smiling in his yellow silk quilted jacket, in his black beret in the rain, holds out the deft hand of friendship and takes the ultimate umbrella to his workbench, carving for me two perfect maple caps, one for now, one for the future, when he knows in his heart I'll need another (don't things always break?)-And won't we two be far apart?

American Ghazal

Sometimes a shift in tone is all you'd need to make you happy. A shade, a shadow-but then you wonder, is this happiness?

Heady scented air of wisteria, lilacs, and vibernum that could drown you through the seven windows.

When you lived on a peninsula, a disoriented shark stranded in the shallows; you observed her with terror, pity, and pleasure.

May, so ruthless with your feelings: you're fiercely in love with your two children a tumultuous continent away.

Still, you could swim naked beneath the Pleiades at high tide and dance barefoot without music, without a partner.

Altruistic surrender-the merciful self-exoneration of maternal memory-undone by a child's mythologies ...

You attached a screen door to the children's room; a determined cat could climb and cling and never reach their cribs.

Although you have not been granted all you craved, you feel no grievance, only an abandoned nestling's agitation.

If an era ends, who will interpret the last chimes? A café closes, currency burns. The present's an archive.

Word arrives of Tokyo's crows pecking at schoolchildren, the elemental smear and grime in immaculate narrow alleys.

The Gemara tells us Thou shalt observe and Thou shalt remember came down from heaven together. Remember?

Gail, you can't choose to run away-so, be alive to the work in this room. Whatever else you've been hoping for.

Acadia

Gray-green morning, mossy, mottled. The saw-whet owl has fallen silent,

though in the mind's near corner he still calls out his hundred too too toos

a minute, his brassy tours de force- tiny Acadian owl, has he abandoned

the scornful love he sought all night, foregone the blizzard of brown feathers

romance occasions? The morning bell rings in a dream's capricious turns-a gilt canoe,

the tilting river, cobalt trees, delicious passion, acrobatic-but the sweet end

never reached, like Blake's ungratified desire. A little coppery squirrel clucks and chuckles

to itself as the island wakes. Twigsong, birdsong, chittering creatures-is this

what you think peace is, flight to where no fear of losing love has left a scar?

A miniscule sliver of light slices the rough cabin floor, new pale ferns uncurl-

the day's first question marks- innocent, insistent at your half-open door.

At First, They

At first, they leaned toward me at the bassinet,

we wheeled together to the river: in the spring, forsythia, daffodils;

then it was very cold, ice. Hard. Slippery. That was the world-

the yellow room-Longfellow Road ("cul de sac," they called it)-

the carriage-pebbles-insects- sycamores-river-sky.

Them.

Now they're gone, and the world- there are darker things,

there were darker things they didn't know yet; now they're gone,

it's me filling with their fractures, their artifacts:

her tenderly refinished chairs, his "corny" jokes, her father's cracked

leather tefillin in a blue velvet bag hidden under the stairs;

relentless inaccurate memories of a shtetl called Chagrin;

the fiery white of her rage, inextinguishable, smoldering in me to despair.

Despair the landscape of our waking dream now, the old time closed above us like a trap door.

Still, the gristle of his hope, part of me-me,

the way my "wild" hair fell in my eyes. The injured click of his "trick knee" on the stairs.

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 and no brilliant doctor

needs to tell me what comes with the terrain, to tell me there'll be no one to carry me toward the stable or bring me safely home, this day of brutal, foretold expectation.

Dana Street, December

As if I had no language and would begin again in the linguistics of infancy, but amnesiac therefore with nothing to say-

(unlike the woman in rehab who could walk and walked the linoleum at all hours, shouting to no one, I KNOW THE WORDS! I KNOW THE WORDS!

-all the words she knew)

I walked, past a yard overgrown, scraggly after the first frost, a rose-the bitterest orange- still blooming, piercing the morning

(My work had stopped, I thought forever)

-perfection or imperfection not the issue, a radiance utterly itself, pale petals tinged fiery (provident neighbor, astute, to nurture that gift)

(I didn't take it)

Not to be thinking Is this enough, this moment, the chilled unpromising air, not to be wanting more than I'd been given, but remembering

last October when I carried a glass vase, its rose lush, creamy, across my living room for your appreciations,

how you rose from the rush-seated chair to meet it, saying,

"Oh no, Gail, the rose doesn't come to you- you go to the rose."

The Swamp Trail

On the sand beyond the privet hedge and the sea grass and the wild roses the sound of young men laughing, giddy girlish shrieking at the wet cold bite of the bay. August, my white desk so near the high window, labor

and play held separate by the panes, the sea grass, the prickly hedge. Another summer's ritual tasks not done, or undone, while the street's gardens shifted from galas to graves-only a few leggy cosmos, and the timid,

almost hidden, anemones. Everything else bolted, dried, clipped. But late summer's dissolve isn't my concern; no, today, it's the swamp I pulled my brother from-the swamp trail, just after the War, forbidden

forest route to school, old pin oak and red maple, my big brother's waterlogged leather shoes, his mud-soaked corduroys we feared the principal would smell and tell on, though she never seemed to notice, so

when we came home the proper way, on sidewalks, Mother didn't know. Even then, Jonny and I were growing apart, or just going silent: we never talked about that morning. Does the swamp, the swamp trail

ever haunt him, too-or is it only me, the thrilled collaborator, guilty, unpunished, heroic sneak? Did I really rescue him? What is the task not done? The trail-is that it? Where follow it?

and how? Doesn't it always end in the same place, right behind the lonely green Lyons playground with two boggy children, before they'd ever heard of sex or homework, peering unnoticed

from behind rough trees, the dark primordial forest? We are done with the work of childhood, it's over now, isn't it, as so much else is finished-but still, I tell myself that Hillel says those who do not grow

grow smaller; rebuke myself, at once teacher and underachieving pupil. An hour ago, I watched an ambulance outside my door, my neighbor's houseguest taken ill, I saw an old man's fresh white sneakers,

his pale veiny legs, his faded shorts, being slid gently on a gurney into the truck's hold. I'm thankful I couldn't see a terrified face or hear the paramedics' reassuring smooth proficiencies. I want to be through

with the unanswered needs of everyone but my darling whose body's been whacked by pain, by transmogrifying drugs. Have I misremembered that once I could save someone, and did, that-braced on a rotting log

in no man's land-it wasn't hard to tug my skinny brother by the hand out of the muck of dead bottom leaves, the decaying flesh of skunk cabbage, out of the rich nutrient ooze, and back up onto our shadowy path?

Now:

There's no way to say it except the blunt way: facts, searing the eye, facts in the nostrils: what you love most becomes what

won't keep, that's the oldest part of the story, not hard: these words slide easily from fingertips daubing the keys:

what you learned today you learned also long ago, and in another, more hopeful life: no place now in the world-no matter how you say it-

untainted, or if you don't say anything, or if you say the mornings are still beautiful, late April's aroma of damp soil,

your neighbor's hyacinth easterish, painterly- wouldn't that also be fact, be true? A poet yesterday said: only poetry speaks the truth,

I knew that to be false: her gorgeous lines breathless, staggered, obscure: if that's true, really, then anything's true: but this report

on my desk, like a script on a stage, is fact, blunt: which of our weapons are leaking uranium everywhere on earth, into the nostrils,

inexorably, the pores, the eyes: how deaths will come here and on distant deserts and ancient cities and be reported falsely,

the young reporter's cerebral hemorrhage not a vascular event, but uranium, too, and those bodies in robes, "ours"

"their" bodies whose faces tried to be masked, bodies fallen along the dunes, the roads, not: this is fact: not someone else's, some enemy's

some other's fault: there are facts undeliverable delivered from the imagination to the page, the page, the page

from this imagination which is true only to itself, selfish, bent on its own peculiar and shapely truth:

The Mission

Soot everywhere. Trains, as if World War Two were our era, pulling out of old South Station. At every grimy window, two or three men-their postures grief-struck, heroic.

The iron terminal all my grandparents had arrived at, their valises and sacks abulge with whatever mean possessions they'd thought to lug into their futures.

Now I had their copper pans, their Sabbath candlesticks. Gloom saturated the enormous room-no light motes, no cappuccinos, no New York Times bestsellers. No matter

what the mission, you'd be too proud to fail to carry through.... The hanging clock's hands could hardly bear the inching weight of time; I couldn't see the arrows move, but if even one local clock

were taken for repair or replacement, we'd be saved from separation. Were we-was I-certain you had no rational choice but to report for duty? You shouldered an Italian leather case I'd never seen,

I, who'd polished and folded all your belongings. I touched your face, you, already distant, aching to "get on with it," and I-I knew a great hole was being torn in my life, my life that felt like

the kind of rice paper Japanese printmakers always seemed to use- such colors, such defined images of comfort and beauty ripped away. Who'd ordered you to go, to cross three continents

and three oceans, knowing the inescapable dangers? Was it the Secretary of War, that garrulous fool? What could I have thought to do or say to keep you from the mysterious assignment you welcomed,

impelled as you seemed to be by your headstrong restlessness, your admirable infuriating insistence on doing what's too hard? Was it too late? On Track Ten, obstinate, oblivious of your wife

in the metallic din, were you off to rescue, or murder, a harmless sinner, were you already doomed to end in a dark alley, iron and soot, by good angels untenanted? Don't go don't go don't go

Cape Air

Unserious, this zany 10-seat Cessna, bright blue cartoon waves painted on both wings, Eugene O'Neill's brooding face darkening one side of the silvered body-he's gaunt, grey, reading "Bound East for Cardiff" as he first read it on Commercial Street, 1914, across from the little house I live in now, the Provincetown Players encircling him, one of his early hungry handsome winters at land's end before fame failed to ease his famous torment.

On the plane's other side, clumsy, rolling, roiling, misshapen dunes and a lean curvaceous vermilion version of our Sienese stone tower dedicated to the Pilgrims by Teddy Roosevelt just when the town's whaling and fishing heydays were about to become history. The air's a damp blue-white fleece blanket we motor laboriously through, chugging low over the ebullient bay.

Inches from me, the pilot's conversational, only a boy: "We'll lose about ten minutes, folks, the air we're flying through's like chowder," (it's usually a twenty-minute flight). The best way out is always through.... New England chowder, thick with potatoes, creamy, might just hold us up, aloft- but sounds more like hot stew this little craft will choke and drown in, downing five incredulous reckless lives. Hard not to be afraid, "flying blind." When I picture, milkily,

Boston's ballparks and parishes, fear blows me backwards to 1968, a July night: Jackie Washington in steamy Fenway Park, just off a turbulent flight, tells the roaring Gene McCarthy crowd-he was the quixotic campaign's warm-up act-how scared he was: I can swim a little, but I can't fly worth a damn! A car backfires and the crowd falls silent. McCarthy, standing on the pitcher's mound, elevated, elegant, unscarred, an elusory hope I never could pin my wounded faith on. One night along the continuum of assassinations.

Cemetery Road

A claw, she called it- her left thumb clamped inside four clenched fingers, she'd shriek when the doctor pried them open. More like an injured

contracted into itself, immovable. I'd wheel her in, wanting someone to do something. She wanted no more of those invasions-she was right-handed, she'd make do, like the three-legged dog trotting around the turn of Cemetery Road yesterday, loving its sturdy dog life- it probably still chases low-flying kites. No more of those appointments, no more doctors swarming around her chair. That hand's gone, she said, twice.

For her, to want her health back would have been to suffer (not to want, the Buddha's recipe for the blessed absence of pain.) Absence of pain-she didn't want that either....

(Continues...)

Excerpted from ZEPPO'S FIRST WIFE by GAIL MAZUR Copyright © 2005 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

New Poems
Enormously Sad
Blue Umbrella
American Ghazal
Acadia
At First, They
Queenie
Dana Street, December
The Swamp Trail
Now:
The Mission
Cape Air
Cemetery Road
Night Visitation
September
Black Ducks
A Small Door
To Whoever May Be Concerned:
Rudy's Tree
To X
Seven Sons
Waterlilies
Zeppo's First Wife

They Can't Take That Away From Me (2001)
Five Poems Entitled "Questions"
Maybe It's Only the Monotony
Not Crying
Evening
I Wish  I Want  I Need
Young Apple Tree, December
The Weskit
Penumbra
Last Night
My Dream After Mother Breaks Her Hip
They Can't Take That Away from Me
Hypnosis
At the Ear, Nose, and Throat Clinic
Girl in a Library
Twenty Lines before Breakfast
Wakeful before Tests
Shangri-la
Two Bedrooms
Poems
Michelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel
Air Drawing
Leah's Dream
Then
Right Now
Keep Going
The Beach
Low Tide
To Begin This Way Every Day
Three Provincetown Mornings
Insomnia at Daybreak

The Common (1995)
Two Worlds: A Bridge
The Acorn
I'm a Stranger Here Myself
Mensch in the Morning
In Houston
Whatever They Want
Desire
Bedroom at Arles
Poem for Christian, My Student
May, Home after a Year Away
Bluebonnets
Fracture Santa Monica
The Idea of Florida during a Winter Thaw
Snake in the Grass
Blue
Why You Travel
After the Storm, August
A Green Watering Can
Maternal
Ware's Cove
Ice
Traces
Phonic
Pennies from Heaven
Another Tree
Revenant
Yahrzeit
Family Plot
Foliage
The Common
At Boston Garden, the First Night of War, 1991
Poem Ending with Three Lines of Wordsworth's
Lilacs on Brattle Street
A Small Plane from Boston to Montpelier

From The Pose of Happiness (1986)
Mashpee, 1979
Mashpee, 1952
After the Fire
Ruins
Mashpee Wine
Reading Akhmatova
Next Door
Fallen Angels
In the Dark Our Story
In the Garment District
A Deck of Cards
Teeth
Being Sick
Elementary Education
The Horizontal Man
Jewelweed
Pears
Early Winter
Anomie
Norumbega Park
Daylight
Hurricane Watch
Dog Days, Sweet Everlasting
Longfellow Park, August
Dutch Tulips
Listening to Baseball in the Car
Two Months in the Country
Graves
Afterward
To RTSL, 1985
Spring Planting

From Nightfire (1978)
Baseball

Editorial Reviews

"A 'new and selected' collection of poetry affords the reader many pleasures a single volume of poetry rarely does. Looming large among these is the chance to track the writer’s growth as an artist. And, because of the broader
canvas, one might get from a “new and selected” group of poems a firmer sense of the writer’s preoccupations in theme and subject matter. Probably the greatest pleasure, however, is the chance to pin down what has drawn one to the work time and again. This became apparent to me as I read the nearly three hundred pages of Zeppo’s First Wife by Gail Mazur, a 'new and selected' collection that gathers twenty-two new poems and a very generous selection from Ms. Mazur’s four previous books. Judging by my marginal notes and underlining, I am invariably taken by the
exquisitely crafted endings of her poems. Book by book, year after year, her poems startle and move the reader with their capacity to end on a note that belongs to her and no one else. Gail Mazur, it seems, is a master of poetic closure. . . . I think the endings of Gail Mazur's poems, no matter how sad, frightened, or perplexed, offer us a luminous quality . . . a quality that marks these new and selected poems from beginning to end."

Provincetown Arts - Fred Marchant

Audacity and modesty: In Mazur's work, those apparent opposites reveal their secret kinship: Modesty from its place on the sidelines can see through the conventional sham of the rules, and audacity has the confidence to embrace the plain, ordinary truth. In the face of demons or emptiness, Mazur offers a song...Part of the pleasure in these poems is their simultaneous large scope and measured, deceptively quiet voice."”

Robert Pinsky

"We dream of living on poetry's high ground, the giddy air and wide prospect that distance us from the drear of everyday life. Yet the brisk, eloquent, and quirky poems of Gail Mazur's Zeppo's First Wife may prove that there is more oxygen at ground level. Mazur finds a magic in the everyday, the delights and disorders that characterize a postmodern and multi-everything America."

Tikkun - David Gewanter

“Audacity and modesty: In Mazur's work, those apparent opposites reveal their secret kinship: Modesty from its place on the sidelines can see through the conventional sham of the rules, and audacity has the confidence to embrace the plain, ordinary truth. In the face of demons or emptiness, Mazur offers a song...Part of the pleasure in these poems is their simultaneous large scope and measured, deceptively quiet voice."”

— Robert Pinsky

Washington Post

"We dream of living on poetry's high ground, the giddy air and wide prospec
— David Gewanter

Tikkun

"A 'new and selected' collection of poetry affords the reader many pleasures a single volume of poetry rarely does. Looming large among these is the chance to track the writer’s growth as an artist. And, because of the broader canvas, one might get from a “new and selected” group of poems a firmer sense of the writer’s preoccupations in theme and subject matter. Probably the greatest pleasure, however, is the chance to pin down what has drawn one to the work time and again. This became apparent to me as I read the nearly three hundred pages of Zeppo’s First Wife by Gail Mazur, a 'new and selected' collection that gathers twenty-two new poems and a very generous selection from Ms. Mazur’s four previous books. Judging by my marginal notes and underlining, I am invariably taken by the exquisitely crafted endings of her poems. Book by book, year after year, her poems startle and move the reader with their capacity to end on a note that belongs to her and no one else. Gail Mazur, it seems, is a master of poetic closure. . . . I think the endings of Gail Mazur's poems, no matter how sad, frightened, or perplexed, offer us a luminous quality . . . a quality that marks these new and selected poems from beginning to end."

— Fred Marchant

Provincetown Arts