The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Barbara Guest

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      by the sea who drew into his lungs the air

      that had several times been around the world.

      A speck of coal dust floated down and settled on my lapel.

      Quickly with your free hand you rubbed out the spot.

      Yet do you know I shall carry always

      that blemish on my breast?

Jaffa Juce*

      This orange bric-a-brac has a paper luster very decadent.

      Crossing Hyde Park I am brimming

      with sad thoughts of the Royal Bank of Scotland

      when the shepherd calls to his sheep

      and daylight crisps my hands in streaks.

      The primroses are lying in thin groups of threes

      transparent as the fool’s stammer

      when the old king came wailing to his pool

      and vagabonds clustered

      to the guard’s hall

      hoping to see

      a burning palace. Then the family

      sat down to tea.

      There’s a lady in a macintosh

      trying to climb a wall. Her tears

      her broken tears,

      more fabulous for their tumult caused

      (by moonlight assembling pears,

      a Jericho harp for the guests)

      she has heard the museum mating chairs,

      seen the varnished fragments of the bomb

      meeting in a closer circle.

      Reginald after the battle!

      What a cry for a miner, alas he’s lost

      his keys and can’t locate the platter.

      The silver cooking geese have left the plain,

      no one shoves the tin

      My darling

      Weymouth sands are green

      There’s drought in the wind

      there’s ash in our eye

      the poor dead hands are clean

      Sing derry down

      the hospital shakes its leaves

      For the players

      and their laughing daughters, the morning is bright

      upon the square, the air shows its face

      like a powdered Indian, the fog

      is braced with sun; over the setting

      heyday toasts there’s a ring of moon

      for tomorrow.

      A crown lies

      under the cake. They’re borrowing streamers

      for the race and white candles with tartan crests

      burn in the cellars below the streets. The Crescent

      has an Egyptian hue. Everyone is civil.

      Buns in the oven, cider in the hall,

      pleasant sings our land.

      Who frets above the stair with sour eye in glove?

      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.”

In Dock

      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, СКАЧАТЬ