Evening

By Gail Mazur b. 1937 Gail Mazur

Sometimes she’s Confucian—

resolute in privation. . . .

Each day, more immobile,

hip not mending, legs swollen;

still she carries her grief

with a hard steadiness.

Twelve years uncompanioned,

there’s no point longing for

what can’t return. This morning,

she tells me, she found a robin

hunched in the damp dirt

by the blossoming white azalea.

Still there at noon—

she went out in the yard

with her 4-pronged metal cane—

it appeared to be dying.

Tonight, when she looked again,

the bird had disappeared and

in its place, under the bush,

was a tiny egg—

“Beautiful robin’s-egg blue”—

she carried carefully indoors.

“Are you keeping it warm?”

I ask—what am I thinking?—

And she: “Gail, I don’t want

a bird, I want a blue egg.”

Gail Mazur, “Evening” from Zeppo's First Wife: New & Selected Poems (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Copyright © 2001 by Gail Mazur. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: They Can't Take That Away from Me (The University of Chicago Press, 2001)

Biography

After nearly 13 years of apprenticing herself to poetry, during which she studied with Robert Lowell and immersed herself in the Boston/Cambridge literary scene, Mazur published her first collection, Nightfire (1978), at age 40. Other books include The Pose of Happiness (1986); They Can’t Take That Away from Me (2001); and Zeppo’s First Wife: New & Selected Poems (2006). Tess Taylor, interviewing Mazur for the Atlantic Monthly . . .

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