By GAIL MAZUR
The flats mid-morning.
Fussy little house-hunting hermit crabs.
Razor clams, skate eggs, black mussels.
Sea glass frosted by the tides.
Far out, schooners, racers, sloops—
Serenity of their white white sails.
Day moon, round, faint, almost transparent,
Hovering in the pale blue sky,
In its orbit still so near the sun.
Seven years alone by the bay.
An old friend, a neighbor, stumbling,
Has lost her way on the sands.
There’s always tomorrow.
There’s always something left to lose.
Something here is blowing bubbles.
Something’s forever burrowing.
Gail Mazur has published seven collections of poetry. They Can’t Take That Away from Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems was the winner of The Massachusetts Book Prize and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize. 2016’s Forbidden City is her most recent collection. Her poems have been widely anthologized, including in several Pushcart Prize anthologies, Best American Poetry, and Robert Pinsky’s Essential Pleasures. A graduate of Smith College, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and the Radcliffe Institute. She was, for twenty years, Distinguished Senior Writer in Residence in Emerson College’s graduate program and now teaches in Boston University’s MFA program and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she has served for many years on the Writing Committee.
