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THE AMAZING MAZER: A NEW POEM

Ben Mazer is always an Eyewear favourite and here the Boston poet of flamboyant brilliance offers us a new poem:


Orphans

The splintered gutter’s cool refreshing pools
of mud’s perspective shatter shadowed noon,
having rejected all philosophy,
its one objective downward to the sea;
the poet’s pants in tatters, and a flower
in bramble coat of mould, deflect who see
in crossing, but the radiant queen
bestows her museship on the violent seer;
these orphans drink their vodka and they gleam
to be descending further than the fold,
past every trinket of the common household,
where tufts of marigolds gleam in the wind,
that signify the sea; quick steps rescind
the future and the present, but the past,
at last familiar, asserts its precedence
where clotted loss builds out of a mixed tense,
the secret intimacy orphans clasp
to one another, to propagate a myth.

There’s no way back from what they carry with.


new poem by Ben Mazer; copyright 2013.  First published at Eyewear today.

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