The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Barbara Guest

green grass side

      hanging down

      I impart to my silences

      operas.

      Climate cannot impair

      neither the grey clouds nor the black waters

      the change in my hair.

      Covered with straw or alabaster

      I’m inured against weather.

      The vixen’s glare, the tear on the flesh

      covered continent where the snake

      withers happily and the nude deer

      antler glitters, neither shares

      my rifled ocean growth

      polar and spare.

      Eyes open

      spinning pockets

      for the glass harpoons

      lying under my lids

      icy as summers

      Nose ridges

      where the glaciers melt

      into my autumnal winter-fed cheek

      hiding its shudder in this kelp

      glued

      cracked as the air.

Sunday Evening

      I am telling you a number of half-conditioned ideas

      Am repeating myself,

      The room has four sides; it is a rectangle,

      From the window the bridge, the water, the leaves,

      Her hat is made of feathers,

      My fortune is produced from glass

      And I drink to my extinction.

      Barges on the river carry apples wrapped in bales,

      This morning there was a sombre sunrise,

      In the red, in the air, in what is falling through us

      We quote several things.

      I am talking to you

      With what is left of me written off,

      On the cuff, ancestral and vague,

      As a monkey walks through the many fires

      Of the jungle while a village breathes in its sleep.

      Someone stops in the alcove,

      It is a risk we will later make,

      While I talk and you bring your eyes to the fibre

      (as the blade to the brown root)

      And the room is slumberous and slow

      (as a pulse after the first September earthquake).

Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher

      I just said I didn’t know

      And now you are holding me

      In your arms,

      How kind.

      Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.

      Yet around the net I am floating

      Pink and pale blue fish are caught in it,

      They are beautiful,

      But they are not good for eating.

      Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher

      Than this mid-air in which we tremble,

      Having exercised our arms in swimming,

      Now the suspension, you say,

      Is exquisite. I do not know.

      There is coral below the surface,

      There is sand, and berries

      Like pomegranates grow.

      This wide net, I am treading water

      Near it, bubbles are rising and salt

      Drying on my lashes, yet I am no nearer

      Air than water. I am closer to you

      Than land and I am in a stranger ocean

      Than I wished.

The Crisis

      Not to be able to carry mice to your room

      when you have walked the boulevards

      with rain at your tail and umbrellas

      opened an edifice of dragoons

      preparing to ascend when the park was hungrier,

      its bursting branches were loaves

      under the yellow sky. Alas the great days

      of desire have passed.

      Prepare for bulbs and minor grasses; seize on

      imported mauves, ivory cutlasses prepared

      in Switzerland for sailors whose white eyelashes

      will curtain the whim of captains and make

      graceful the long Cape trip. You will sail

      upon mats of periwinkles, if you prefer.

      Why tramp now the marshes where the expert mice

      rest on borders and sit

      with their pierced hearts? They have grown fat

      under the discipline of raiders who need in the night

      corridor a lawful pillow, in the black watches

      a slim straw purchased for a mouse, a hat

      to cover the dark marches and the small

      confidences laid on cushions before daybreak

      when fountains plash and mirrors reflect

      the thick mud where armies have passed.

Upside Down

      Old slugger-the-bat

      don’t try to control me

      I’ve a cold in my head

      and a pain in one side

      it’s the cautious climate

      of birds.

      Where the bitter night shows

      fat as an owl the skeleton

      not counting the skin.

      This species can’t bite,

      but it has a hurt. We’ve all got birds

      flying at us

      little ones over the toes.

      The hand that holds is webbed

      no knuckles

      but the bone grows.

Seeing You Off

      Bracketed in my own barn

      where ignorant as those armies

      I flash my light upon the Hudson

      and shout continental factories

      take fire! Send navies out from Jersey

      let there be more edens

      of soap and fats

      Such splendors make rigid a democracy

      define