The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Barbara Guest
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Is it the Marvellous Boy? Someone crept from a grove?
Who carries the axe with sharpened blade,
not that wraith of laureates under the hill?
The prisoner or the emigrant horde?
Ho for the emigrant’s song!
“In this autumn’s double grace from war
I watch the housefronting plummets of cream
wear echoes of sinks
and banners of choice portals
when I ride my sorrel to Marble Arch
praying for the liquidating
skin to melt
into a victory column
built like a ship
bonded for New Plymouth where my fortune
(folios of bent seed)
will take root on the first wave
will take root.”
In Dock
We are living at an embarkation port
where the gulls
and the soft-shoed buoys
make Atlantic soundings
This air of ours is photographing fish
and the rice and the white antelope pelts
are asleep in the dark orchid hold
where old women have sent their black lids to be parched
and young bronze boys are tying knots in their limbs
while the spume and the salt
send thick-painted pictures to the hatchway
O Thracian! O Phoenician!
Vergilian harbors are wearing laurels
yet our hideaways are empty
as your camphor bottles, the scent
the wild scent has fled the hills
to couple under thyme beds
and the nectar of honey, it too has faded.
Fleeting rivers, your robberies
have paved our zones, you’re alive in our hearts
as yesterday or tomorrow
or the ghost ship from Athens
plying its shuttered bark
crying Zeus! Zeus!
as it shatters this pier.
People in Wartime
Attilio, the minor Hun,
Rose with the sun.
Washed his face
In a little grape
And cried, This is I.
This is one who would
Conquer
The fever
And the world outside.
With this he took a stride
Across his hall bedroom,
Faced the broken glass
And into the mirror sighed,
Such was I.
Now am I to become
This singular juxtaposition
Between the man
And his decision
Am I history, or am I a plot?
Or such was his reflection
For
He was not interested
In
Art
Or politics
Or women
Or even getting ahead,
I have said
He was a minor character
And his misery
Was not Alpine,
But extremely particular,
Was he history, or was he not?
Landing
This afternoon I am very careful.
I watch myself. I watch the egg
Unhatched. I am the sight
Over the egg, like an aviator
Unknowing, but confident
That the instrument will behave.
The window outscaped
Brings the climate indoors.
The eye is free, adorned
By that which is becoming.
What is near, prevalent, adored
By the inner is echoed
By the ear. My conscience
Is receptive. I sight the cause
Of the exterior and so I hear
What is sounded in the interior.
Yet the break is this:
The germinal is split.
Not content with eye and sphere,
I race the continual
And drift to the absurd,
The conjugal, from which
The flight is only heard.
History
for Frank O’Hara
Old Thing
We have escaped
from that pale refrigerator
you wrote about
Here
amid the wild woodbine landscapes
wearing a paper hat
I recollect
the idols
in those frozen tubs
secluded by buttresses
when the Church of
Our Lady cried Enough
and we were banished
Sighing
strangers
we are
the last even breath
poets
Yet the funicular
was tied by a rope
It could only cry
looking down
that midnight hill
My lights are
bright
the walk is
irregular
your initials
are carved on the sill.
Mon Ami!
the funicular
has a knife
in its side
Ah