Sunday Evening, Barbara Guest
I am telling you a number of half-conditioned ideas Am repeating myself, The room has four sides; it is a rectangle, From the window the bridge, the water, the leaves, Her hat is made of feathers, My fortune is produced from glass And I drink to my extinction. Barges on the river carry apples wrapped in bales, This morning there was a sombre sunrise, In the red, in the air, in what is falling through us We quote several things. I am talking to you With what is left of me written off, On the cuff, ancestral and vague, As a monkey walks through the many fires Of a jungle while a village breathes in its sleep. Someone stops in the alcove, It is a risk we will later make, While I talk and you bring your eyes to the fibre (as the blade to the brown root) And the room is slumberous and slow (as a pulse after the first September earthquake).
