The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Barbara Guest

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СКАЧАТЬ goes this wandering blue,

      This horizon that covers us without a murmur?

      Let old lands speak their speech,

      Let tarnished canopies protect us.

      Where after the wars, the peaceable lions,

      The forests resting from their struggle,

      The streams with loads upon their icy backs,

      Is this a reason for happiness,

      That one speaks after such a long time,

      That the hand one holds leads one far away?

      Is this a fairy tale then?

      This new-discovered place where one can dream

      Of tigers with fair hair and houses whose hearths

      Are tended by knights lingering there?

      Riding down to Venice on borrowed horses

      The air is freed of our crimes,

      Lovers meet in the inns of our fathers

      And everywhere after dusk the day follows.

The Past of a Poem

      Do you remember as I do,

      the beautiful dressing that covered

      the old poem?

      There it lay not quite dead,

      nor even suffering, but so quiet

      the linen didn’t stir

      and all that heartache, the way

      water runs in sewers

      and you walk over them

      sometimes twisting your heel

      knowing how dirty the river

      under the slender neat street

      You might even refuse

      to put a bird in it

      if the feathers

      weren’t too moist and stained,

      a difficult color

      The cold water flat that June

      night you put your hands on the radiator

      crushed by your fingers

      yet still fresh that poem

      from its bewildering year

      Come close to it now

      and listen, don’t you hear

      “septic sighs of sadness”?

ARCHAICS

Atalanta in Arcadia

      Atalanta who paces the roadway

      January 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”

      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, СКАЧАТЬ