The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Barbara Guest
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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