The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Barbara Guest

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СКАЧАТЬ fall of my voice would be,

      a dying brown.

All Elegies Are Black and White

       To Robert Motherwell

      When Villon went to his college

      he wore a black gown

      he put his hood up when

      he went out on the black streets.

      He ate black bread

      and even drank a kind of black wine,

      (we don’t have any longer)

      it wasn’t that good Beaune

      his skill taught him how to steal,

      a disappearing drink also.

      The sky was white over Paris,

      until it fell in the streets,

      like a sky over mountains,

      disturbing and demanding.

      When you are in Spain

      you think of sky

      and mountain where the forest

      is without water.

      You think of your art

      which has become important

      like a plow

      on the flat land.

      There are even a few animals

      to consider.

      And olives.

      Do you regard them separately?

      The forms of nature,

      animals, trees

      That bear a black burden

      whose throat is always thirsty?

      I know of Seville of black carriages

      one factory

      one river

      the air is brown.

      Alas we have fair hair, are rojo.

      Throw a mantilla over your face

      rojo of the light,

      walk only in the white spaces.

      The trains that cross back and forth

      the borders of Elegy

      sleep all afternoon, at night

      lament the lost shapes.

      I think when you oppose

      black against white,

      archaeologist you have raised a dream

      which is bitter.

      The white elegy

      is the most secret elegy.

      One may arrive at it

      from the blue.

      The sky in Spain is high.

      It is as high as the sky

      in California.

      When one begins with white and blue

      it is necessary for one’s eyes to darken.

      One may have fair hair in Spain,

      yet the trouble of blue eyes!

      Unless one can always live

      sparsely as in Castille.

      (How wise you are to understand

      the use of orange with blue.

      “Never without the other.”)

      And what courage to allow oneself

      to become black and blue!

      It is necessary that eyes be black

      so the white may deepen

      in them the white may sink,

      it can then be constant, as music

      is constant, or a marriage, or fountains,

      or a palace whose shadow is constant.

      To make an Elegy of Spain

      is to make a song of the abyss.

      It is to cut a gorge into one’s soul

      which is suddenly no longer private.

      This privacy which has become invaded

      straightens itself up, it sings,

      “I am proud as a cañon.”

      Can you imagine the shock over the world

      against which two enormous black rocks roll

      this world that looks like a white cloud

      shifting its buttocks?

      When the guitar strikes

      A procession of those tasters of ecstasy

      the thieves of dark and light

      beginning with Villon

      whose black songs are elegies

      whose elegies are white

       Dios!

The Open Skies

      I

      Molluscs in their shell

      the skies

      Breathe up and down

      unspiraling

      Open skies

      seeded with light and stone

      II

      Pattern of drift Is eye of air

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