By Barbara Guest

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   
eyes curled outside themes to search the paper   
now gleaming and potent, wise and resilient, word   
entered its continent eager to find another as   
capable as a thorn. The nearest possession would   
house them both, they being then two might glide   
into this house and presently create a rather larger   
mansion filled with spoons and condiments, gracious
as a newly laid table where related objects might gather   
to enjoy the interplay of gravity upon facetious hints,   
the chocolate dish presuming an endowment, the ladle   
of galactic rhythm primed as a relish dish, curved   
knives, finger bowls, morsel carriages words might   
choose and savor before swallowing so much was the   
sumptuousness and substance of a rented house where words   
placed dressing gowns as rosemary entered their scent   
percipient as elder branches in the night where words   
gathered, warped, then straightened, marking new wands.

• Arts & Sciences

Poet Bio

Barbara Guest was born in North Carolina, and attended the University of California at Berkeley. After college she moved to New York and became associated with the poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara. Like them, she rejected the then-dominant Confessional school and looked for influences from French poetry. Also like them, she closely associated herself with the art world of New York as a writer for Art News and other arts magazines, and claimed such artists as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning as influences. Her poetry is often very musical and finds ways to draw attention to the language of the poem itself. See More By This Poet

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