Interlitq publishes sections 1X, XXIII and XXV of “The King” by US author Ben Mazer
from The King
IX
Out there, in the backyard, out by the sand box,
a world of laundry lines runs like planets to the stars,
it is so vast a world to call across,
and steeped and drenched in promise, like those stars
paired to grow brilliantly in shining pride.
Shapes retaining the imagination,
stepping forward, without even a voice to call,
but wrinkled by the wind, as if important,
the peach trees repeating what they made the planets,
endless, but even then a legend of loss.
Are memories real, or only imagination!
The oldest memories of rooms and flags . . .
They can’t have been, as this itself can’t be.
All is previous! Yet joyous to live inside them.
XXIII
An Old Lady in the Natural History Museum
And should the afternoon go down
upon the echo of the brown
enumeration of our race
and leaving a residual face
exempt us from this constant place
still see incognizant the sign
levelled between the smile and frown
and cropped hedge the long anodyne
and evening parallel they drown.
For there thin lips and watered eye
are hunched upon the citadel
in deep inversions of the sky
and permutations of the town
that the old crone will never tell.
XXV
How many times bungling boys from Brooklyn
will tear up the screen with their jokes and women.
Did they know Hart Crane? At evening’s silver party
they are the least likely of all to go insane,
but peopling the leaves beyond the orchestra
might catch a glimpse of the heroine’s golden bra,
but what of it? They’re sailing out at dawn,
impersonally speculating on
the cleanest outcome for the neighborhood.
Sometimes the roughest wiseguys must do good.
An Asian don checks their progression
but at last by their concession
they occupy the ingenue’s obsession.
Even the luckless smile at what they’ve done.
About Ben Mazer: Ben Mazer’s recent collections of poems are Poems (The Pen & Anvil Press) and January 2008 (Dark Sky Books), both published in 2010. His new collection of poems in India is Tales of the Buckman Tavern (Poetrywala, April 2012). Mazer studied under Christopher Ricks and Archie Burnett at the Editorial Institute, and is the editor of a forthcoming edition of the complete poems of John Crowe Ransom. He has also edited collections of poems by Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and Landis Savage Everson. He is a contributing editor to Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
