The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Barbara Guest

the foam has left off

      ascending

      the day meets your borders

      so easily

      where you have discovered it.

The Hero Leaves His Ship

      I wonder if this new reality is going to destroy me.

      There under the leaves a loaf

      The brick wall on it someone has put bananas

      The bricks have come loose under the weight,

      What a precarious architecture these apartments,

      As giants once in a garden. Dear roots

      Your slivers repair my throat when anguish

      commences to heat and glow.

      From the water

      A roar. The sea has its own strong wrist

      The green turf is made of shells

      it is new.

      I am about to use my voice

      Why am I afraid that salty wing

      Flying over a real hearth will stop me?

      Yesterday the yellow

      Tokening clouds. I said “no” to my burden,

      The shrub planted on my shoulders. When snow

      Falls or in rain, birds gather there

      In the short evergreen. They repeat their disastrous

      Beckoning songs as if the earth

      Were rich and many warriors coming out of it,

      As if the calm was blue, one sky over

      A shore and the tide welcoming a fleet

      Bronzed and strong as breakers,

      Their limbs in this light

      Fused of sand and wave are lifted once

      Then sunk under aquamarine, the phosphorous.

      Afterwards this soundless bay,

      Gulls fly over it. The dark is mixed

      With wings. I ask if that house is real,

      If geese drink at the pond, if the goatherd takes

      To the mountain, if the couple love and sup,

      I cross the elemental stations

      from windy field to still close. Good night I go to my bed.

      This roof will hold me. Outside the gods survive.

Les Réalités

      It’s raining today and I’m reading about pharmacies

      in Paris.

      Yesterday I took the autumn walk, known in May

      as lovers’ walk.

      Because I was overwhelmed by trees (the path from the playhouse

      leads into a grove and beyond are the gravestones),

      squirrels and new mold it is a good thing today

      to read about second-class pharmacies where

      mortar and plastic goods disturb death a little

      and life more. It is as if perpetual rain

      fell on those drugstores making the mosaic brighter,

      as if entering those doors one’s tears

      were cleaner.

      As if I had just

      left you and was looking for a new shade of powder

      orchidée, ambre, rosé, one very clarified and true

      to its owner, one that in a mirror

      would pass for real and yet when your hand falls upon it

      (as it can) changes into a stone or flower of the will

      and triumphs as a natural thing,

      as this pharmacy

      turns our desire into medicines and revokes the rain.

In the Middle of the Easel

      My darling, only

      a cubist angle seen after

      produces this volume in which our hearts go

      (tick tick)

      I see you in a veil of velvet

      then I’m quiet because you’ve

      managed the apples, you’ve arranged

      to sit. You are twice clothed

      in my joy, my nymph.

      Painters who range up and down

      Mont hill or Mont this, disarray

      in the twilight those boulevards,

      make every stroke count and when one of the Saints

      (in the dark apse tonal) quits,

      I’m with you.

      Together we’ll breathe it,

      you and I in the sleeve forgiving requiem,

      in the priest tinted air.

      In the gaslight that ridiculous plume

      reminds me of hawks, I admire

      their arc, I plunge

      my everyday laughter into that kimono wing

      what a studio soar! What rapture!

      The gifted night, the billowing dark!

      The heroine Paint sobs

      “No one who has ever loved me

      can tell me why

      there are two birds at my wrist

      and only one flies.”

On the Way to Dumbarton Oaks

      The air! The colonial air! The walls, the brick,

      this November thunder! The clouds Atlanticking,

      Canadianing, Alaska snowclouds,

      tunnel and sleigh, urban and mountain routes!

      Chinese tree

      your black branches and your three yellow leaves

      with you I traffick. My three

      yellow notes, my three yellow stanzas,

      my three precisenesses

      of head and body and tail joined

      carrying my scroll, my tree drawing

      This winter day I’m

      a compleat travel agency with my Australian

      aborigine sights, my moccasin feet padding

      into museums where I’ll betray all my vast

      journeying sensibility in a tear dropped before

      “The Treasure of Petersburg”

      and gorgeous this forever

      I’ve a raft of you left over

      like so many gold flowers and so many white

      and the stems! the stems I have left!

Cape Canaveral

      Fixed in my new