—1509
I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture,
swollen up here like a cat from Lombardy
(or anywhere where the stagnant water’s poison).
My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s
pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy’s. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles the paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!
My haunches are grinding into my guts,
my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,
every gesture I make is blind and aimless.
My skin hangs loose below me, my spine’s
all knotted from folding over itself,
I’m bent taut as a Syrian bow.
And because I’m like this, my thoughts
are crazy perfidious tripe:
anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.
My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, painted the Sistine Chapel from 1508–1512.
Gail Mazur is the author of eight books of poetry, including Land’s End: New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press 2020), Forbidden City (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and They Can’t Take That Away from Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems (2005) won the Massachusetts Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, a center for the poetry community since 1973; serves on the Writing Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; and was visiting faculty in Boston University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing from 2016 to 2020. She has twice been a fellow in poetry at the Radcliffe Institute. She lives in Cambridge. (updated 10/2023)
Mazur’s The Common was reviewed in AGNI 42 by Jennifer Clarvoe.
Mazur’s They Can’t Take That Away From Me was reviewed in AGNI 54 by Peter Campion.
AGNI published A Tribute to Gail Mazur in AGNI 78.