Ben Mazer / poetry

Conjuror

Last night I dreamed I hurled a ball of gas down a lengthy funnel into the center of the earth where it exploded in flames.

The Ruined Millionaire

The ruined millionaire writes in gray ink

dried out by centuries. High hedges brink

the tangled overgrowth surrounding him

and his estate. He does things on a whim,

like take out childhood letters for an evening,

despite the fact his loneliness is grieving

for company that never comes. Who They?

No one gets inside. No one can say

what makes him tick. He lights a parlour trick

by rote, as if the moon were doing it,

but there is no audience, none can complain

he took a turn and willfully insane

made silent inventory of his pain,

his need for utterance still unfulfilled,

reminders of the time that he first killed.

Control is his. Considers History,

and sees that through a century or three

the ways of doing things have little changed.

In the new light he finds himself estranged,

and counts the hours, dead leaves till they’re distant,

awaiting his incapable assistant.

Across the town he knows worms also burn

to eat her up, he hasn’t seen in years.

The centuries dried out ink like his tears

for which he sometimes took a different turn.

She lives in mansion, with a hundred cats,

a hundred rooms, a hundred shoes and hats,

a hundred servants whom she never sees,

but one, admiring her Theocrites.

Dead to the world. Beyond this fortress hurled

his thoughts, his childhood’s movie theaters,

the life of everyman which it avers

to suncrawl time, duly a life of crime.

To do good is disaster

waiting to happen. Who likes Lady Astor?

In youth he stayed a while in Rockaway,

and often he remembers to this day

strange moments, instances of the specific

remaining solid, beautiful, beatific.

What was their form? He rightly cannot say.

Iron in the sun. They pass in rows this way,

while he will let the whole estate decay

forgotten, but time’s camera always pans

along the outskirts to the garbage cans,

and sees his window in his own reflection,

also a form of outer introspection.

The Snow Trucks Stop and Blow Their Low Alarms

The snow trucks stop and blow their low alarms,

It could be any city, but it’s not,

It’s midnight, darkness holds me in its arms,

Spine branch of tree distorted through the window,

Grey light, no lover moving in the shadow,

The Knick knacks on the sill dispense their charms

In silhouette, the air so still it’s sleeping,

But I am not, memory engages me,

The static past is full and would be weeping

If it could be described, but no it can’t,

Can only feel it passing cloudlike through me,

And I must be in love with what I see,

The snow trucks rumbling in the distance now,

Alone with twin salt shakers anyhow.

Lexington

I am from Lexington, the birthplace of liberty.

Ill with leading a rich, full life,

acquainted with the European trances,

worried for the unseen newspaper

falling like a dead leaf in the stadium light

while in floral patterns we peruse

the movie section, falls in dead of night.

Copley and Sargent and Singer are abstruse,

and beauty often comes in for abuse,

smoked cigars and hired out a draper,

summered in the mountains, crossed a broken bridge

into the midst of celebrations, the old town

with every inhibition falling down

as if each citizen would take a wife,

you never saw such ordinary dances!

The universe was all that I could see.

A gargoyle seated on memorial throne

of stone and ivory, white and glossy grey,

charred lustre, cadmium streaks rub out in mist

of an evening quite beyond reproach.

Entrance and approach, twin salves of heaven,

crypto-mythic patterns of the roof,

a simple myrmiad, or bibliotheca which is strewn

with fool’s flowers drawn from love’s own lake

upon a singular fortune for your sake.

Amid this debris I was born,

as on a bier, across the tooth

of city skylines opening like a flower.

Here we walked and talked

and London Bridge was only a legend, a thing in books,

but to those books we had given many looks,

and though at five o’clock we find a booth,

life is not what matters, standards are,

values, instilled by God the Father,

life is the experience which is your knowledge,

it is getting late, and elephant and the pig wait on the shelf

for such and such and such a future date,

as midnight will corroborate

the visitors docked in their rooms, and trailing shawls,

a peacock spectrum of night’s gothic poison,

the speck of lint stuck to p. 49,

the stadium light falling after dark.

We sit and read our papers after dinner,

and on the eve of travels, when his aunts

remembered all, over their pinochle.

The morning came like a new minted coin,

ocean-side, a militant feminist

took aim and threw as hard as she could throw

an iron discus right into my dick.

It didn’t even hurt. That’s Harvard for you, these days.

In the park, the soapbox demonstrators —

the wind, it made their voices sound like cardboard.

These mountain mornings, industriously lazy,

and though I wrongfully say most are crazy,

make the right decision for the wrong reason,

we sit mid-mountain, pointillistic specks,

the abstract pie shop hangs over the valley

so far down below roofs could be tarps

layered with sunlight by the filtered angels,

and faded to white, next to green faded white,

the dirt of dry grass, childhood’s ant brigades.

Up on high stands the mountain, out of reach

impossible to see in the sun’s glare.

Icicles frozen in the sun’s gaze seize and breach

our apperception, and the brother bear

has fallen by the crest of detailed, intricate curves.

Like clock-work every five years headlights swerve

at the clown’s picture, local and memorial,

abandoned by the strength of reality,

near Enfield, long before Renfield

at the beginning on a bare landscape

or lady-scape (overhead) in white and grey

illustrated the evening, sat in the graveyard,

his eyes bleeding into autumnal symphony.

The radio blares about the doctor,

that life in space is certain, the chimpanzees

of school-clocks curb-side, let off the bus

in a strange town, quite unlike

any one you have seen before, not unlike

a fiction and you find you are the author.

Alfred, Ethel, Barbazon, and Arthur

attend the movies, charity to sculpture,

I was assaulted in the park.

It didn’t spoil my revery, but let me live a fuller life,

on the edge where the pennants

veer into a captured ocean, rife

with knowledged urgency, above the index

of the various brands of Windex. My true love

is handing cartons over a border fence

to me in dreams, and I will not wake

till classic history wakes in winter weather

and I am once again a woman

in the lineaments of wonder, and the table

spells sea arrival, mid the dystopian

lecture that you gave at the lyceum,

keen on your arrival to befit

you with the customs and a keener look,

then vacancy, the European mind —

nowhere to be found, a fairy-tale!

In the cellar theatrical properties

and paintings, trunks, of costume jewels,

pirate treasure, and men’s magazines.

Nothing endears the mind except the truth.

I am still amazed at all that passion

growing daily, planned like a tea party.

In youth I fell in love with the old movies

and disappeared like Ahab in the screen,

The Son of the Sheik with Rudolph Valentino

gave fevered distance to the afternoon,

its byways and coursings palpable only in the breach,

the stock market, the rare book store, out of reach,

I have mingled close to Clytemnestra,

and running out of paper say in despair, 

‘There is a western arbitrary weather

‘that rarely gives up houses. Cockled trees

‘return upon occasion. House means pie

‘or cattle, news upon the shelf

‘sent over the mountains, from the Eastern life

‘that meant so much once. Decades in the attic

‘left marks of visitors. Recall their names

‘and faces, drinking beer with them.

‘We meet every night in the same place.

‘Our ongoing discussion gains in focus.

‘The telethon collects for rare diseases,

‘and here, in life, we go on,

‘motivated now by self-defense.

‘The pallbearer is winking in the aisle.’