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

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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

      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

      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)

      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.

      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

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