Edward Mayes
Edward Mayes Poems
In London, 1973, watching Ultimo Tango a Parigi
From the theater's balcony, might I not have
...
Because the queue was far longer for the question
Session than the answer session, we switched
To the answer session. It was right to swerve,
Since who asks about the snap, crackle, and pop
...
To those of us who would rather be alive
Than not alive, unbaked rather than baked, ruth
...
The shutters close slowly in the camera
Da letto, siphoning what light there
...
After we found the sack of tchotchkes in the garage
Next to the Ntozake Shange souvenir poster
And the three jars of chow-chow from last year's
...
That Gabriele from Cortona at thirteen,
Former Romanian orphan, would shoulder
A fisarmonica at the edge of a wheat field
And play, the sweet squeeze, the pleated
...
I have only watched someone turn the auger,
Cutting through the obvious ice, in a belief
Of that which is swimming below. Neither of us
...
We remember now it was Luis Buñuel Portolés
Stropping his razor in the first frames
Of Un Chien Andalou, the moon split in two
...
Until today I hadn't thought about Anthony Hecht
Arriving at Flossenbürg two weeks too late
To save Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his neck as
...
That can't be used for any other purpose
Than to change what it has been thrown
Upon, as when the egg whites clarify the stock,
...
Until recently I had believed in something like lack
And even something like lack of lack, all this
Occurring while listening to Willie, age 9, listen to Click
...
Until only last week I hadn't thought
Of myself as seriffed or sans seriffed,
Or whether one should be buried when
...
Until an hour ago I hadn't known the colophon
Followed the explicit, in a logopoetical sort of
Way, after "the dance of the intellect among
...
Not that you can hold us to it but then
E-roads didn't exist until recently. Our fingernails feel
Veneered on our fingers, sinewy and locked, our hearts awaiting
...
We can't explain the pained look we
Had in the elevator: it went up, we
...
You've hit most of the traffic cones
You'd only swiped the day
Before. And the hand pump's
...
Edward Mayes Biography
Edward Mayes is the author of five books of poetry including First Language (University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), which won the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and Works & Days (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), which won the 1998 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. He is coauthor, with Frances Mayes, of three books about Tuscany: In Tuscany (Broadway Books, 2000), Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style From the Heart of Italy (Broadway Books, 2004), and The Tuscan Sun Cookbook: Recipes from Our Italian Kitchen (Clarkson Potter, 2012). His poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, Poetry, The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, Southwest Review, and Crazyhorse.)
The Best Poem Of Edward Mayes
In London, 1973, Watching Ultimo Tango A Parigi
In London, 1973, watching Ultimo Tango a Parigi
From the theater's balcony, might I not have
Seen you through smoke broken by
The light from the projector, or among those others
Who walked out into humidity after Paul, 48, is shot
And Jeanne, 19, holds the gun she fired, and
Yet I drop from another day, the air dieselized
And silted with Thames water and the near-knowledge
That edges are best kept edgy, the edge of the street
Where I fall into traffic, the remembered black
And white buzzing in living rooms of Edge
Of Night, or the way the blinded Earl of Gloucester
Jumps off the edge of the cliff and dies on
The way down, crumpled into nothingness,
And Marlon Brando also years after weighing in
At twice what I weigh, weighted down, thirty
Years earlier crumpling on the Parisian balcony, his
Last act sticking chewing gum under the railing,
And the page I am reading turns itself, and
The trellis that holds up the rows of grapes
Tumbles over, of its own free will and decay,
Wooden to pieces, stabbed by weather, heart
Impaled by what isn't heart, for a couple
Of hours in the darkness, the time it takes
For night to take hold, when I want the lights
Out or just down for a moment, hand ready on the switch.
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