Philip Guston, Dial, 1956. Oil on linen. © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth.
POEM
On the Battle Green they smoke pure Indica,
soldiers raging for sleep, the comatose
lovers of bloodshot, planners of indigence
always interrupted, states mixed by ladies
raging for battle, the invitation to the dance.
Restless as maps to initiate a racing
explanation mixed between the spacing
of leaf on leaf, leading to lateral growth,
the highborn hopes of every farmer bathing by the moonlight
with pitchfork ready to pass the soap
steeped in Greco-Indic partner compost.
These stances by which you know them
become dances suddenly on a whim.
Will a by whom or a by leave make known whom
also better, bettered, relax fruitfully into a classic manic fatigue.
You must admit that there is something regal
about their old New England stock and trade and barrel,
men from whom in a minute the British shall receive their due.
How much does this have to do with what is now and what is new?
It is no longer fair to ask Robert Lowell
to make neat houses with a little trowel,
cottages for the survivor who lessoned there,
mixing up skivvies with underwear,
low on the lights for the Saturday fights
my personal trainer has altered my sights.
Be here, be now, New England,
home of my deliciously skillful aunts,
authors of corsairs and cormorants.
I shall do what is to do. Aesthetics
are unassailable, stand firm, like the mountain in ice.
I look forward to the pool this summer.
The pond, the lake, the river and the ocean.
Book in hand, pen firmly gripped, I will pen letters
to the good people of Ukraine and Romania.
Like opening poppies I dream of admiring their sweaters,
house to house, window to window, glance to glance.
And wake sweaty with the long summer and nightsweats,
in progress, backsliding as it seems it must,
leading at last to exhaustion and rejuvenation
on the cold mantle of the summer's lust.
THE LETTER
She paid ten thousand dollars for the letter,
deshawled at the direction of her better,
who threw it on the ground. The big day came,
and everything appeared to be the same;
she was acquitted. Moonlight has no sound,
eyes moving through the shadows on the ground,
where a jewelled knife appeared then disappeared.
Those jewels were eyes that pierced her with no answer,
the fullness of the dragon which is weird.
She asked to be acquitted as a dancer,
then took the little stroll to her surrender.
The dragon lady and her man would end her,
it all seemed planned. She would not make a stand.
The new plantation also was in China.
Like peonies she opened her vagina.
The jewelled knife went in, thrust silently,
clouds snuffed the moonlight like a bamboo tree.
❂
BEN MAZER’s forthcoming and tenth poetry collection is The Ruined Millionaire: New Selected Poems (MadHat Press, 2023), Preface by Glyn Maxwell. Mazer’s critical edition of The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in June 2023.