M A R C H 1 9 9 8 ![]() THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM MEby Gail Mazur | |||||||||||||
![]() (For help, see a note about the audio.) Also by Gail Mazur: Young Apple Tree, December (1999) Bluebonnets (1995) Go to: An Audible Anthology Poetry Pages |
The way the blue car spun tonight on imperceptible ice -- that stop- time: bare pocked sycamores, the river's black sheen, the football stadium empty of Romans, the oblivious sky- line shining like a festivity -- and, shaken, I could still straighten the formidable blue invention, slide the delinquent wheels to a curb; the way in South China, the car radio says, believers crowd closetlike shops to purchase tiny packets of Bear Bile, a favorite cure-all, while bears go mad in their abscessing bodies, in cages barely their height, hurling themselves, banging their agonized heads at the bars -- lifetimes of pain only, for the dubious sake of an ancient "medicinal harvest"; the way a mother, stirring sweet batter in a well-lit kitchen, feels the Pyrex bowl slip to the floor, and it breaks, and seeing there'll be no upside-down cake for dinner, shrieks at her little boy cowering in the doorway, Look what you made me do! and lunges to smack him, the way she'd struck yesterday and last week, though he's as still as a stalled truck; the way I felt last night when she hung up on me. I knew I'd hurt her because her mind 's gone, and I refused for my life to let mine follow again; the way I held the dead phone, relieved to be not listening at last -- the memory of all that, no no -- relieved, selfish, and empty: wouldn't I choose if I could not to be human, or any other mammal programmed for cruelty? No, they can't take that away from me Gail Mazur is the poet-in-residence of the Emerson College M.F.A. program. She is the author of The Pose of Happiness (1986) and The Common (1995). Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; March 1998; They Can't Take That Away From Me; Volume 281, No. 3; page 70. | ||||||||||||
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