| Not Crying by Gail Mazur | ||
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Whatever the intention, a poem about grief is not grief, nor the expression or cry of it. So, if I describe a Jewish cemetery, the small gray or brown pebbles on the broad sill of a gravestone ("What does that mean?" my daughter asks at my father's grave. "Kilroy was here!" my stoical mother answers, embarrassed as she is by an Old Country tradition which I explained to her last time, the pebble that says "I was here," or "always." Dry-eyed mother, one moment irreverent and the next, sentimentalizing father's perfections—a far cry from the litany of complaint still lingering in my phone's limbic); or if I should describe my tears as I stood there with Kathe, nine years after his unveiling, that would be description—not crying. My young cousin ill at our aunt's open grave the next row of stones over, a chiselled row of names from my childhood my children will never know. This is paper, ink, not a heart breaking —nor a healing, either. Something I make, so when the day is over there's something here. (first appeared in Alaska Quarterly)
_________________________________________________________________________ GAIL MAZUR is the author of three poetry collections, most recently (click title to purchase at Amazon.com) The Common (Chicago). "Not Crying" is from her new ms, They Can't Take That Away From Me (University of Chicago Press), which is due out in the February, 2001. Gail Mazur is the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge and is 1997-98 Poet-in-Residence at Emerson College. In 1996-97, she was the Fellow in Poetry at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College.
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