Ben Mazer: Poems in Quarantine

Special Collection: Creativity in the Time of the Pandemic 2020>>

Poems in Quarantine

Concerning Lviv

Inevitably and every night in dreams
I leave my home to seek some far off course
at a fast but investigative pace
surprised by vistas intimate and vast
along the way–some places I have known
or known by rumour or discovery
know as cognition. (The history picture books
imagining the disappearing cities
contend with the primary, the parental.)
Some third world country
a surprise return to England
or the vast reaches of the west–
generally by ship during tsunami
at the crowded and famous ports
filled with crooks and conmen
meeting for dinner in the Italian restaurant
of the port authority concourse.
Nearby, Boston’s chic buildings
and places for posh people gathering
of my father’s generation in the sixties
when he had an office there in Harvard Square
and drove a red MG convertible around Boston
with me in the sun to the buildings at MIT
where he posted an ad for the old volkswagen.
Or other–far–residential areas–where I
knew forgotten people of the ’80s or ’90s.
Strangely familiar sites of once incredible revelation.
A place to be returned to for the memory it gives.
A memory to be remade before the dream breaks.
A city to be rebuilt. Victoria Amelina’s “vanishing city”
is the city of artists, of those who find it difficult
to communicate or be truly understood
and therefore are duly traumatized angels,
inhabitants of Lviv’s censorious castle,
the loveliest of princesses who is my own ideal,
sheer capital of the world, Austro-Hungarian empire,
the vanishing jew, his salt and herring mania–
bloodlands that are lost to history,
unspeakable histories and no golden age.
But fighting now to get behind enemy lines
I have to find the one I am in love with
to bring her back over the border
but first a series of explorations of neighborhoods
to find the familiar old accommodations
or else in the parallel dream the mountainous regions
of the west shed odd demographic statistics
to give a strength to each one of my plans
so that they all tie together at the end.
There are visits to cultural institutions
where ballets are performed or multimedia film
at cliff’s edge reaching to a violet sea
where I declared my love once years ago.
And here with respite we meet for a bit
before the long journey all the way home
giving me time to make plans with Nikolayev
to score supplies and meet at ground zero
accommodations Katia and he inherited–
temporary, enough for a meeting of minds.
Then there are issues to be cleaned up
concerning chiefly the inevitable discovery of books
in old storage, famous and histrionic storage,
friends of Christopher’s, scions of the middle west,
old Cambridge hotspots long lain undisturbed,
this was just a town when I moved in,
old-timers who knew Delmore or Eliot,
laughing gas in damp and musty attics,
the unsealed boxes, now put up for sale–
titles forgotten, no example had ever existed,
titles never even recorded,
manuscript materials, clippings and newscuts,
ah, the locally privately printed.
These auctioneers are manuscripts themselves,
genealogical studies, men of fame,
coming from towns pf western Massachusetts
to smiling put their fathers up for sale,
bringing me in for the day from the distant township
(hard to find a coffee or donut at midnight)
recently arrived in turmoil and turbulent waters
eluding those who most would like to kill me
and finding signs of Philip in advance
(our true meeting will be understood
as eternity held in contemplation
in the hours before the sentencing of fate)–
when I wake, no memory of the ultimatum.

Poem

The backyard where I sat all night to write–
an ocean of green, green trees, green grass, bright lights
from all the windows surrounding me in sight;
ten years ago these were my favorite nights.
Scintillating and resplendent stars
align in pine cone silhouette or firs
or birds or squirrels, points the spectrum screens
for yellow and red dominating greens,
that lusher forest, yellow under the light,
writ for a woman, who was unduly light,
no matter at all, for I was in the glow
of happiness and reading, in the know
with great ideas, ways of feeling ill,
my patterned studies, incomparable still.

Poem

Oh man, that would be swell. Stray shards of glass
confining and consigning numbers in the light
turned it a hue of green. I wonder what you mean
to lament his death by drowning now
now I hear coughing in the other room,
his eyes were dead lights, cords of rope his arms,
the bloodless nerves raw and exposed,
eaten away by the sea, where children play
and wander too far to the great dark deep–
a shovel hits the bottom of the sea.
And bounces where two sharks swim blithely by.
This positive privation fills his mind
at day’s end, did I say it was day’s end?
Night after night his family pulled the blind
so autumns passed only by the slickering sound
of headlamps rearing round the window’s curve
in ghost glass covered by fishbowl curtain.

Poem

Poetry had stopped. The sky in the new city
was drained of color. Ice encased the trees.
The people slept. The sky was drained of sleep
and consciousness. It was the single witness
of all my little books piled in the dark
and candle-swirling light-storm of my room;
all night strange seas churned underneath the rug.
People who don’t exist meet, fall in love;
these parallels marked by an earlier time
have random places in time’s slow and sifting
annunciation of our proper tone.
The storm-starred mother hackles to the throne;
confessions broke off when Rimbaud arrived.
Invisible in the snow, the daily rounds,
to recognize the salience the rain spells.
Morning ascends. This caw caw almost spring
was early in our own day a beginning.

Poem

Bubonic man is doing what he can,
just like a New Yorker cartoon, a New Yorker,
on a sofa, with a dog, a mate, a martini,
going by day to the office, peering in bookshops, buying flowers,
in his middle of the night fantasies,
peering over the towering gates
of the millionaire’s identical estates,
for a view of the millionaire’s view;
it is his knowledge that we rue,
the loss of things held out of view.
We lived these things again and again,
deep in the mirrored and reversed
dividing corridor, cancelled, thrust
in a language that we detest
outside of caricature, to the fringe
of bent illusion, heaven-sent
velocity and its restraint,
pinhole pinnacle corporeant.
I am deriving into view
of the housewrecks that I knew;
upward lined along the sea,
cars stalled unto eternity.
The bearded men with backs burned red,
the babies screaming in the sun,
their mothers wiping them with cloth,
the furious traffic of each one.
Many a painting has evinced
this scene, all in museums now,
or in the hands of millionaires
who are not seen, conspiring to
effect a cold spring. When the furious sun
attacks with pleasantries those on the run
or murders nihilists with happiness,
we dare not ever think we shall surpass
the millionaire in privacy his loss–
his colleges, his papers, and his pass;
annually I pray he be my boss.
These ruminations mount on global stress.
It leaves a gold dust waning in its wake,
a wealth of wonder party to the take
of channeled numbers. Rivers calculate
access accessed in its frozen state
in berried bearings. Otters huddle low
in riverbank houses. Wagner whirls the stars,
effusions of the gong-like Hamilcars
that pierce the universe with echoings
the vast declining corridor still sings.
Take Hamlet peering out now on his break,
angry about Ophelia, OCD,
whose tread is somewhat silent for our sake,
what is the gulf-like stress, disparity,
reordering our minds that’s here at play,
fascinating, riveting, manhole covers off,
Chaplin escaping? Remember the policeman’s cough.
Lately the war news is not good. Humanity
is once again perched in convexity
with history. The numbers are not good
for scholars peering through a lens of wood.
Still, history tells us plainly, if we look,
and look with seeing, full of the landscape,
its predecessors, playing back the tape,
all eyes on Hamlet, watch him leave again,
it is his entrance, banishing the when
from Gulliver’s marble bathtub, rose scent soap,
the other travellers stay in this hotel
till they can’t pay or aren’t feeling well,
but those with serious intent find unused corners
to pen quick letters, sometimes one line warners,
plainly, plainly, time of the dispatch,
while people stand around and sometimes watch.

Poem

What is it? What is the wind doing? Nothing.
Open the door a little. I’m alone.
I want some fresh air and the sounds of birds,
on this back terrace. The rolling of the smoke–
to some it has become a party joke.
It’s rained for twelve days now. More. Fifteen.
The smell of flowers, then the wind dies. Wharves
down by the ocean where they sell fried fish
and baited hooks, old veterans took their looks.
Too ill with a nervous condition to reply,
I made a note of their particular forms
which informed nothing, and sank back where it came from.
I am well rehearsed at the old norms,
I am the purveyor of Romantic storms,
dry and classical in my ideal,
aesthetic and embodying what I feel,
in a rotation I wait for friends–
one by one we stroll and make amends
for being different, being late, for having missed you;
a greater weight comes when I say I kissed you.
But all is as it was so long ago.
I like the study of a little text.
A sentence or a phrase would suit me best
to nail ideas coming from the next
exemplary new world for which we test.
As I say, they rotate, one by one–
I wait for them to wake,
and wonder at philosophy for their sake.

Published on April 12, 2020. © Author.