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

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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.”

      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.

      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?

      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.

       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

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