"In Another Country"
Click here to listen to Gail Mazur read this poem. I sat at his oak desk trying to write, turned the pages of one of the books, Mandelstam. Merwin. Milosz. Outside, no river, but there was a ship canal, The city smelled of oil natives didn't smell, There were many things I liked: his Saarinen chair, the warm humid air, Spanish moss festooning his department's building was made of— I dressed in the dark, pulling my shoes out I went to his job, wearing one blue shoe, one maroon —my students thought it was the style somewhere, Sometimes before sleep, I'd sit in the womb chair sometimes I lay in bed with his insomnia, listening —But those shoes, the maroon and the blue:
For months I perched on the surface of his life.
ate at his table, holding his fork in my right hand,
then another, from his alphabetized shelves:
O'Hara. Petrarch. Pound.
ships delivering or carrying oil away.
the grass was coarse and spongy.
the fanfare of school buses arriving across the street,
the live oaks everywhere, the white fossil granite
exquisite whorls, the chambered nautilus scattered
over its 3 stories, precise impressions
of tiny ancient sea creatures I couldn't identify … .
from under his double bed, blind to their color,
(maroon for Houston, blue for distant Boston?)
it made them shy, they'd study my feet admiringly.
his mother-in-law had left him, the color of beet soup;
to the downstairs neighbor cough her irradiated lungs away.
as the joke goes, I had another pair, just like it, at home.
Gail Mazur's fifth book, Zeppo's First Wife: New & Selected Poems, won the 2006 Massachusetts Book Award in poetry. She is distinguished writer in residence in the graduate program of Emerson College.
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