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Ice

By Gail Mazur b. 1937 Gail Mazur

In the warming house, children lace their skates,

bending, choked, over their thick jackets.

A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy

it’s hard to imagine why anyone would leave,

clumping across the frozen beach to the river.

December’s always the same at Ware’s Cove,

the first sheer ice, black, then white

and deep until the city sends trucks of men

with wooden barriers to put up the boys’

hockey rink. An hour of skating after school,

of trying wobbly figure-8’s, an hour

of distances moved backwards without falling,

then—twilight, the warming house steamy

with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs

aching. Outside, the hockey players keep

playing, slamming the round black puck

until it’s dark, until supper. At night,

a shy girl comes to the cove with her father.

Although there isn’t music, they glide

arm in arm onto the blurred surface together,

braced like dancers. She thinks she’ll never

be so happy, for who else will find her graceful,

find her perfect, skate with her

in circles outside the emptied rink forever?

“Ice” from Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems by Gail Mazur. Copyright © 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Source: Poetry (December 1987).

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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