The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Barbara Guest
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wind in her tresses
throws leaves against the wall,
only her lover waits in the shade
adoring his thin magnetic ankles.
On Arcadian nights the eager moon
has two fellows who hold the balloon,
that’s all they have to do,
until day cast in bronze
makes Atalanta angry and they fall
beside a stream of air
arms flailing at her strenuous leap,
so fair when she promenades
Venus proclaims her a glorious follower,
if the path her lover takes is steep, perhaps
he shall slip and she will bury her tears
in his garments,
then other nymphs will laugh with her
for briefly the promises of mortals
are cheerless.
Careless Atalanta,
that boy once continual shadow prepares
for the age of athletes, the ritualistic
grass uncovers his apple and bees
are stumbling in your sacred pasture.
Who is there to warn Atalanta
that her huntress days are over?
Who will tell her
of the famous youth pursuing her?
And the speed with which her girlhood
will be consumed?
The sweetness of the capture?
If one kind god hiding in the thicket
would change that last strophe!
“From Eyes Blue and Cold”
From eyes blue and cold
the nymphs drink
your snow
Olympus
There on watchful
heights dawn prepares her lesson
as the groves thicken with
one’s first song
See now its wing arch
over the valley and the brisk foot
of the satyr no longer limping
From eyes blue and cold
out of the abandoning water
another goddess
Again Olympus
from your delicate forgeries
a naïve daybreak
Hoof, reed, horn
will bring to the sandy river
a far-off coastal lithesomeness
when she awakes
with seaweed in her arms
from eyes blue and cold
shares that beauty
Dido to Aeneas
I love you
I have permitted myself to say choirs
(as if the late birds sang in branches) when for them
in the dusk at wind set
the garage eave yields its water cup.
Not for us the paling light
the white urn at the driveway,
nor for us the palmettos and the squeak
of tiles. The fountain at noonday cries,
“You are not here” and the sea at its distance
calls to a single path flanked by hibiscus,
the sea reminds itself each day
that it is solitary and the bather gambles
in its waves as a suicide who says “tomorrow is
another” an hour in the wrecker foam.
I love you
I am writing your name as if I were a Trojan
who expected someone else to smooth the shore
of souls who said
to the great reaches of wave and salt,
“I am replenishing as a light falling on a single tree”
and it is wonderful like ice on a floe,
I love you
miracle, mirror, word, all the same
you come, you go
I love you
(on my rioting lawns the plaster flamingos
endure your wonder)
Green Awnings
Leander walked over with a basket of peonies.
He was eating grapes he had picked by the old
cottage where he stayed and where there was a door
hung with vines. He was living on grapes, training
his muscles for that solitary climb. Somedays the tower
seemed higher and he felt a little blue twinge
in his arm.
She was sewing a white heron into her gown.
Messages came each day from her father, but
she ignored them, preferring to think of the pale
autumn legs of her bird.
She put water in a vase and wished for flowers.
It was half-past three, but the Latin sun
stayed in the room. How she longed to bathe
in the river. How piteous to be a prisoner
when one was as young as she knew herself to be
in her mirror. She was as earnest as her parents
and nightly prepared her body. She was hopeful
and prayed to the stars who liked her.
She went to the window.
Games need companions, he decided, and sat on the grass.
He had pretended that tree was the armor of his friend, Catylus,
and used up his arrows. The river urged him
to practice his stroke. Later floating on his back,
looking up at the tower, he saw an arm pulling
at an awning strap. What was his surprise when
the green canvas loosed, a girl’s hair fell after it.
Palm Trees
What an arch your
heavy burlap branches
decide they’ll go into!
(the first plunge did not destroy
that green youth hid itself)
And now freshly you start to go upward
You want to reach a curve that