Barbara Guest

The simple contact with a wooden spoon and the word recovered itself, began to spread as grass, forced as it lay sprawling to consider the monument where patience looked at grief, where warfare ceased eyes curled outside themes to search the paper now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient, word entered its continent eager to find another as capable as a thorn. The nearest possession would house them both, they being then two might glide into this house and presently create a rather larger mansion filled with spoons and condiments, gracious as a newly laid table where related objects might gather to enjoy the interplay of gravity upon facetious hints, the chocolate dish presuming an endowment, the ladle of galactic rhythm primed as a relish dish, curved knives, finger bowls, morsel carriages words might choose and savor before swallowing so much was the sumptuousness and substance of a rented house where words placed dressing gowns as rosemary entered their scent percipient as elder branches in the night where words gathered, warped, then straightened, marking new wands.

There we go in cars, did you guess we wore sandals? Carrying the till, memorizing its numbers, apt at the essential such as rearranging languages. They occur from route to route like savages who wear shells. “I cannot place him.” Yet I do. He must ascend indefinitely as airs he must regard his image as plastic, adhering to the easeful carpet that needs footprints and cares for them as is their wont in houses, the ones we pass by. Such a day/or such a night reeling from cabin to cabin looking at the cakewalk or merely dancing. These adventures in broad/or slim lamplight, Yet the cars do not cheat, even their colors perform in storm. We never feel the scratch, they do. When lightning strikes it’s safer to ride on rubber going down a mountain, safer than trees, or sand, more preventive to be hid in a cloud we sing, remembering The old manse and robins. One tear, a salty one knowing we have escaped the charm of being native. Even as your glance through the windshield tells me you’ve seen another mishap of nature you would willingly forget, prefer to be like him near the hearth where woodsmoke makes a screen of numbers and signs where the bedstead it’s not so foreign as this lake. The plateau, excursionist, is ahead. After that twenty volumes of farmland. Then I must guide us to the wood garage someone has whitened where the light enters through one window like a novel. You must peer at it without weakening, without feeling hero, or heroine, Understanding the distances between characters, their wakeful or sleep searchingness, as far from the twilight ring the slow sunset, the quick dark.

1 On a wall shadowed by lights from the distance is the screen. Icons come to it dressed in capes and their eyes reflect the journeys their nomadic eyes reach from level earth. Narratives are in the room where the screen waits suspended like the frame of a girder the worker will place upon an axis and thus make a frame which he fills with a plot or a quarter inch of poetry to encourage nature into his building and the tree leaning against it, the tree casting language upon the screen. 2 The telephone is Flaubert’s parrot and it flitters from perch to perch across the city. Or someone is holding the dead thing in her hand in a remote hotel. A sensitive person with a disability who speaks to the inanimate. She may even resemble Louise Colet or the helpful niece. She hasn’t sent her meaning and I am absent in these reminiscences of her. The telephone is the guignol of messages. It may have been cold moving down from roofs, a continental wind caught between buildings. Leaves and pollen blowing onto fire escapes. Windstruck hambones lying in a gutter. Equinoc- tial changes the body knows, the hand feels, the truck passes without notice and buildings con- tinue their nervous commitments. The earth may have been moaning underneath this junk. I am caught in the wind’s draft. 3 At night viewing the screen of distance with shadowy icons framed by light I understood the rasping interior was rearing other icons, No longer gentle they flashed ripened clauses, or images raised formidable projections of ice, the wall was placed in a temporary position where words glittered from a dark cover, Narcissism lived in a silver hut. 4 In the lighter time of year words arrived concealed in branches. Flaubert exchanged himself for words, night became a night of words and a journey a journey of words, and so on. Words became “a superior joke”, I trembled under a revolutionary weight, a coward fleeing from a cloud. The ego of words stretched to the room’s borders assuming the sonorous movement of a poem. 5 I entice this novice poem with a mineral,Beryl. The dictionary bestows on Beryl a skittish description, like a sequence in which a car moves over ruptured roads and slices into ghost veins of color— a camera follows each turn, examines the exits where rock protects a visionary tool that prods it:— “A light greenish blue that is bluer and deeper than average aqua, greener than robin’s eggs blue, bluer and paler than turquoise blue and greener and deeper than beryl blue—a light greenish blue that is bluer and paler than beryl or average turquoise blue— bluer and slightly paler than aqua.”

I go separately The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands it is the dungaree darkness with China stitched where the westerly winds and the traveler’s checks the evensong of salesmen the glistening paraphernalia of twin suitcases where no one speaks English. I go separately It is the wind, the rubber wind when we brush our teeth in the way station a climate to beard. What forks these roads? Who clammers o’er the twain? What murmurs and rustles in the distance in the white branches where the light is whipped piercing at the crossing as into the dunes we simmer and toss ourselves awhile the motor pants like a forest where owls from their bandaged eyes send messages to the Indian couple. Peaks have you heard? I go separately We have reached the arithmetics, are partially quenched while it growls and hints in the lost trapper’s voice She is coming toward us like a session of pines in the wild wooden air where rabbits are frozen, O mother of lakes and glaciers, save us gamblers whose wagon is perilously rapt.

“painting has no air . . .” —Gertrude Stein That there should never be air in a picture surprises me. It would seem to be only a picture of a certain kind, a portrait in paper or glue, somewhere a stickiness as opposed to a stick-to-it-ness of another genre. It might be quite new to do without that air, or to find oxygen on the landscape line like a boat which is an object or a shoe which never floats and is stationary. Still there are certain illnesses that require air, lots of it. And there are nervous people who cannot manufacture enough air and must seek for it when they don’t have plants, in pictures. There is the mysterious traveling that one does outside the cube and this takes place in air. It is why one develops an attitude toward roses picked in the morning air, even roses without sun shining on them. The roses of Juan Gris from which we learn the selflessness of roses existing perpetually without air, the lid being down, so to speak, a 1912 fragrance sifting to the left corner where we read “La Merveille” and escape.

That is why I am here not among the ibises. Why the permanent city parasol covers even me. It was the rains in the occult season. It was the snows on the lower slopes. It was water and cold in my mouth. A lack of shoes on what appeared to be cobbles which were still antique Well wild wild whatever in wild more silent blue the vase grips the stems petals fall    the chrysanthemum darkens Sometimes this mustard feeling clutches me also. My sleep is reckoned in straws Yet I wake up and am followed into the street.

Unreasonable lenses refract the sensitive rabbit holes, mole dwellings and snake climes where twist burrow and sneeze a native species into houses corresponding to hemispheric requests of flatness euphemistically, sentimentally termed prairie. On the earth exerting a willful pressure something like a stethoscope against the breast only permanent. Selective engineering architectural submissiveness and rendering of necessity in regard to height, eschewment of climate exposure, elemental understandings, constructive adjustments to vale and storm historical reconstruction of early earthworks and admiration for later even oriental modelling for a glimpse of baronial burdening we see it in the rafters and the staircase heaviness a surprise yet acting as ballast surely the heavens strike hard on prairies. Regard its hard-mouthed houses with their robust nipples the gossamer hair.

In the past we listened to photographs. They heard our voice speak. Alive, active. What had been distance was memory.    Dusk came, Pushed us forward,   emptying the laboratory   each night undisturbed by Erasure. In the city of X, they lived together. Always morose, her lips soothed him. The piano was arranged in the old manner, light entered the window, street lamps at the single tree. Emotion evoked by a single light on a subject is not transferable to photographs of the improved city. The camera, once commented freely amid rivering and lost gutters of treeless parks or avenue. The old camera refused to penetrate the unknown. Its heart was soft, unreliable. Now distributed is photography of new government building. We are forbidden to observe despair silent in old photographs.

for John Coltrane Words after all are syllables just and you put them in their place notes sounds a painter using his stroke so the spot where the article an umbrella a knife we could find in its most intricate hiding slashed as it was with color called “being” or even “it” Expressions For the moment just when the syllables out of their webs float We were just beginning to hear like a crane hoisted into the fine thin air that had a little ache (or soft crackle) golden staffed edge of quick Mercury the scale runner Envoi C’est juste your umbrella colorings dense as telephone voice humming down the line polyphonic Red plumaged birds not so natural complicated wings French! Sweet difficult passages on your throats there just there caterpillar edging to moth Midnight in the chrome attic

At sunset from the top of the stair watching the castle mallets wrenched from their socket fell from ambush into flame flew into hiding; above the stoneware a latch like muscle hid the green; he stood waist high under the rapt ceiling and hanged the sparrow; where the kitchen had been a mirror of eggs served in a tumbler he saw the ring when a lancet pierced and threw it. In a basket and lowered it where sails enter the harbor over a parchment like dominoes; the petrel-like eyelash. To the sun and its rites were pulled the dried banners; they flew past the ruins the tower and window where ivory guided the mist on his back; he rubbed his eyes and counted them kneeling wrinkled as grass. A ghost in their nostrils put a heel at their forehead; they saw only the moon as it fasted.