Barbara Guest

The Screen of Distance

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.”
 
The speculative use of mineral prevents an  
attachment to words from overflowing, inserts  
a vein of jazz, emblems of color and overcomes  
the persecuting stretch of racetrack where words  
race their mounts ....
 
 
6
 
Beryl became a distraction as one speaks of color  
field or someone as a colorist or of color pre—
dominant, so the paper on which the poem would  
rest was grainy with color flashing lights  
and the depth, the deepness of the country lane
on which shadows found repose was a wilderness of  
color, ditches and trees lost their contours. I  
created a planned randomness in which color  
behaved like a star.
 
 
7
 
To introduce color to form
I must darken the window where shrubs  
grazed the delicate words
the room would behave
like everything else in nature,
 
Experience and emotion performed
as they did within the zone of distance  
words ending in fluid passages
created a phenomenal blush
dispersing illusion ....
 
 
8
 
A difficult poem intrudes like hardware  
decorating a quiet building, a tic taking  
over the facade, a shrug exaggerated by a  
column—
 
Shelley sailing into the loose wind,
the storm of neurosis hindering the formal plan,  
a suggested dwelling left on the drawing board  
with clumps of shrubs indicating hysteria or,
 
Daylight gleams on the rough street where a  
blameless career sighs, the poet beak dips  
in air, his little wings cause a mild stir,  
as someone comes down the stair
he pleads with infancy,
 
A woman speaks to a dish, old forks, amid her  
preparations she smiles touched by history.  
Chipped, sundry evidences of temporal life  
hiding in a bush. In formal dress domestic  
remarks reel into a corpus known as stanzas.
 
 
9
 
The Bride raised the cloud settled on her
aspen head and stepping away from her bachelors  
she seized like wands the poem I handed her:
 
                 “A life glitters under leaves  
                 piled for anonymity ...”
 
She would lead us through glass to view the  
enigmatic hill where a castle slung a shadow.
 
 
10
 
There was a dream within a dream and inside  
the outer dream lay a rounded piece of white  
marble of perfect circular dimension.
The dreamer called this marble that resembled  
a grain of Grecian marble, “Eva Knachte,”
who was blown into the dream by the considerate  
rage of night.
 
Her name evoking night became a marble pebble,  
the land on which she rested was the shore  
of the sea that washed over her and changed  
her lineaments into classic marble, a miniature  
being, yet perfect in this dream, her size  
determined by the summer storm with which  
I struggled and seized the marble.
 
The marble was a relic, as were the movements  
of nature on the poem. The sea had lent
a frieze, waves a shoulder when the investitures  
of a symbolic life feuded. In that dimness  
with bristles, straw, armor plate, grotty  
Alexandrines there appeared a mobile fiction ....
 
 
11
 
A man who calls himself a Baron yet strays from  
his estate into the cadmium yellow
of a bewildering sunset rendered by apprehension  
where a broad approach to a narrow tunnel  
is fanned by leaves is faced with a decision—  
at the stylized ominous entrance he wonders  
if reality will maintain him or empathic snow  
subdue his quest ....
 
 
12
 
I sifted through these fictive ambiguities  
until there was a plain moment  
something like a black table where
 
Dialogue set in motion urged a search  
in memory for that tonal light  
illuminating the screen,
 
The Baron faded as distance gleamed  
a clear jar multiplied by frost.
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