The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Barbara Guest

skeleton

      permit the night to cleanse its air

      with moving vans

      olympic as dawn

      Upon the big liner

      moored at last

      by little landscape poems

      frail as lifeboats

      settling down to rest

      While we kiss in the saloon

      far above the cries

      from plows and auto parts

      sending up goodbyes

      as ugly as those waifs of paper

      on the pier

      or that truck profiled into gloom

      his whole insides protest

      Departures make disgust into a cartoon

      of rose Nabiscos and I digest

      the sinking afternoon in a fleet

      of taxicabs dead sure as you

      and Carthage after?

      we’ll float on that wine-dark sea

Safe Flights

      To no longer like the taste of whisky

      This is saying also no to you who are

      A goldfinch in the breeze,

      To no longer wish winter to have explanations

      To lace your shoes in the snow

      With no need to remember,

      To no longer pull the two blankets

      Over your shoulders, to no longer feel the cold,

      To no longer pretend in the flower

      There is a secret, or in the earth a tomb,

      And no longer water on stone hurting the ear,

      Making those five noises of thunder

      And you tremble no longer.

      To no longer travel over mountains,

      Over small farms

      No longer the weather changing and the atmosphere

      Causing delicate breaks where the nerves confuse,

      To no longer have your name shouted

      And your birthmark again described,

      To no longer fear where the rapids break

      A miniature rock under your canoe,

      To no longer repeat the mirror is water,

      The house is a burden to the weak cyclone,

      You are under a tent where promises perform

      And the ring you grasp as an aerialist

      Glides, no longer.

Sadness

      We were walking down a narrow street.

      It was late autumn. In my hotel room

      the steam heat had been turned on. In the office

      buildings, in the boutiques, coal was lit.

      That morning I had been standing at the window

      looking out on the Tuileries. I had been crying

      because the yellow tulips were gone and all the children

      were wearing thin coats. I felt an embarrassing pain

      distributed over my arms which were powerless

      to order the leaves to blossom or the old women

      on the stairs to buy shoes to cover their feet.

      Then you took my hand. You told me that love

      was a sudden disturbance of the nerve ends

      that startled the fibres and made them new

      again. You quoted a song about a man running

      by the sea who drew into his lungs the air

      that had several times been around the world.

      A speck of coal dust floated down and settled on my lapel.

      Quickly with your free hand you rubbed out the spot.

      Yet do you know I shall carry always

      that blemish on my breast?

Jaffa Juce*

      This orange bric-a-brac has a paper luster very decadent.

      Crossing Hyde Park I am brimming

      with sad thoughts of the Royal Bank of Scotland

      when the shepherd calls to his sheep

      and daylight crisps my hands in streaks.

      The primroses are lying in thin groups of threes

      transparent as the fool’s stammer

      when the old king came wailing to his pool

      and vagabonds clustered

      to the guard’s hall

      hoping to see

      a burning palace. Then the family

      sat down to tea.

      There’s a lady in a macintosh

      trying to climb a wall. Her tears

      her broken tears,

      more fabulous for their tumult caused

      (by moonlight assembling pears,

      a Jericho harp for the guests)

      she has heard the museum mating chairs,

      seen the varnished fragments of the bomb

      meeting in a closer circle.

      Reginald after the battle!

      What a cry for a miner, alas he’s lost

      his keys and can’t locate the platter.

      The silver cooking geese have left the plain,

      no one shoves the tin

      My darling

      Weymouth sands are green

      There’s drought in the wind

      there’s ash in our eye

      the poor dead hands are clean

      Sing derry down

      the hospital shakes its leaves

      For the players

      and their laughing daughters, the morning is bright

      upon the square, the air shows its face

      like a powdered Indian, the fog

      is braced with sun; over the setting

      heyday toasts there’s a ring of moon

      for tomorrow.

      A crown lies

      under the cake. They’re borrowing streamers

      for the race and white candles with tartan crests

      burn in the cellars below the streets. The Crescent

      has an Egyptian hue. Everyone is civil.

      Buns in the oven, cider in the hall,

      pleasant sings our land.

      Who frets above the stair with sour