The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest - Barbara Guest Wesleyan Poetry Series

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Selected Poems. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995. Note: in 1950 Barbara Guest was living in a rental apartment on East Ninth Street, Manhattan, New York.

      East Ninth Street, New York (1950). On cover of Barbara Guest’s Miniatures and Other Poems. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

      Awakening (1951). On cover of Barbara Guest’s Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1999.

      Wheel (1951). Following page (page 97) to Barbara Guest poem “Leaning Structures,” in American Letters & Commentary, Winter 2007; Anna Rabinowitz, Executive Editor; Catherine Kasper and David Ray Vance, Co-Editors.

      The Red Gaze (2003). On cover of Barbara Guest’s The Red Gaze. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2005.

      Notes and Acknowledgments

      The poems collected here include all of the work that Barbara Guest had elected to publish in book form, along with the handful of poems she completed after her final book, The Red Gaze (Wesleyan, 2005). It was her stated wish not to include in this book any poems published in magazines or journals but not subsequently collected in one of her books. Because certain discrepancies in the published versions of some of these poems have not been resolved, minor changes have been made, without comment, in punctuation, spelling, and line spacing. This book is organized chronologically by collection. Given the nature of a collection of this size, some spacing issues have needed to be resolved. For instance, in texts like Symbiosis—a continuous poem that, in the original, prints only a few lines per page—page breaks in the original are indicated by a bullet. Please note that the poem “The Time of Day” appears only in the 1960 edition of The Location of Things (Tibor de Nagy, 1960). The final poems are arranged chronologically—insofar as this can be established—according to the date they were completed.

      Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publishers of the original editions of Barbara Guest’s books. Special thanks go to Mae Klinger, the editorial intern at Wesleyan University Press who prepared the manuscript for production.

      —Suzanna Tamminen

      Wesleyan University Press

       Poems THE LOCATION OF THINGSARCHAICSTHE OPEN SKIES

      Why from this window am I watching leaves?

      Why do halls and steps seem narrower?

      Why at this desk am I listening for the sound of the fall

      of color, the pitch of the wooden floor

      and feet going faster?

      Am I to understand change, whether remarkable

      or hidden, am I to find a lake under the table

      or a mountain beside my chair

      and will I know the minute water produces lilies

      or a family of mountaineers scales the peak?

      Recognitions

      On Madison Avenue I am having a drink, someone

      with dark hair balances a carton on his shoulders

      and a painter enters the bar. It reminds me

      of pictures in restaurants, the exchange of hunger

      for thirst, art for decoration and in a hospital

      love for pain suffered beside the glistening rhododendron

      under the crucifix. The street, the street bears light

      and shade on its shoulders, walks without crying,

      turns itself into another and continues, even

      cantilevers this barroom atmosphere into a forest

      and sheds its leaves on my table

      carelessly as if it wanted to travel somewhere else

      and would like to get rid of its luggage

      which has become in this exquisite pointed rain

      a bunch of umbrellas. An exchange!

      That head against the window

      how many times one has seen it. Afternoons

      of smoke and wet nostrils,

      the perilous makeup on her face and on his,

      numerous corteges. The water’s lace creates funerals

      it makes us see someone we love in an acre of grass.

      The regard of dramatic afternoons

      through this floodlit window

      or from a pontoon on this theatrical lake,

      you demand your old clown’s paint and I hand you

      from my prompter’s arms this shako,

      wandering as I am into clouds and air

      rushing into darkness as corridors

      who do not fear the melancholy of the stair.

       for Mary Abbot Clyde

      In the golden air, the risky autumn,

      leaves on the piazza, shadows by the door

      on your chair the red berry

      after the dragonfly summer

      we walk this mirroring air our feet chill

      and silver and golden a portrait

      by Pinturicchio we permanently taste the dark

      grapes and the seed pearls glisten

      as the flight of those fresh brown birds

      an instant of vision that the coupling mind

      and heart see in their youth

      with thin wings attacking a real substance

      as Pinturicchio fixed his air.

      After all dragonflies do as much

      in midsummer with a necessary water

      there is always a heaviness of wings.

      To remember

      now that the imagination’s at its turning

      how to recall those Pierrots of darkness

      (with the half-moon like a yellow leg of a pantaloon)

      I would see you again (like the purple P

      of piazza).

      Imagination

      thunder in the Alps yet we flew above it

      then met a confusion of weather and felt

      the alphabet turning over when we landed

      in Pekin. I read the late Empress’s letters

      and thought they were yours,

      that impeccable script followed by murders

      real or divined

      as the youth leaning over the piazza

      throwing stones at his poems. He reads

      his effigy in the one that ricochets

      he weeps into the autumn air

      and that stone becomes golden as a tomb

      beware the risky imagination

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