Barbara Guest Poems

On this dry prepared path walk heavy feet.
This is not "dinner music." This is a power structure.
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Once more riding down to Venice on borrowed horses,
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Cloud fields change into furniture
furniture metamorphizes into fields
an emphasis falls on reality.
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"painting has no air . . ."
—Gertrude Stein

That there should never be air
in a picture surprises me.
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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
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There is no fear
in taking the first step
or the second
or the third
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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
...

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
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Each artist embarks on a personal search.
An artist may take introspective refreshment from green.
...

Someone has remembered to dry the dishes;
they have taken the accident out of the stove.
Afterward lilies for supper; there
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