Whiting Award winner Paul Guest’s second volume of poetry is the recipient of the 4th annual Prairie Schooner Book Prize. And Notes for My Body Double is a book full of gems within gems—lines and images that make each poem glitter and sparkle, even when the sentiment pushing the language forward is sullen or dark.
For a Woman’s Back
The French have a word for the small
of a woman’s back, ensellure, and God
forgive the poverty of the tongue I was born to.
Whole days have stopped me dead
on my shambling way to the bank or barber
to watch for a time the brocade of rain
streaming from a magnolia’s branches.
Homeward I would think of all the ways
to describe to you what I saw.
Love, I thought, for I always begin with love,
the earth owes us this much joy—.
Or, this: Lucifer’s wife must be weeping,
and soon I was lost in the tangle
of my childhood, in the speech of my mother,
who would have called that rain
a gullywasher. How quickly I lose my way.
Forgive me. To speak
of one desire is to invite a thousand others
home with you, and by their look
all of them are starved for love and affection
as they purr and tug at your cuffs.
Over there, sharpening her claws
on the refurbished heirloom divan
is the desire to see Prague
just once in its frail blush of spring.
Sprawled on the couch is unrequited love,
pale and wan, forever undone
by countless Keatsian swoons—
he doesn’t breathe so much as weepily sigh.
It’s better that I keep silent.
So much trouble has taken root in my life
and caught me unaware,
as tonight when crossing the street
I stepped out without a thought to what roared
down upon me, snarling smoke:
nothing. All around me, the night:
as if I were the only one
who had, in all the history of the world,
mattered at all, as if fate
perched upon my shoulder like a chattering bird
and to its precious song
I ordered my steps. And here I came
alone with just these few words
and this snatch of song looping again
and again. It goes like this—
but you can’t hear me, or be touched at all.
In the full moon’s face I see
what I’ve forgotten: each star to be wished on
awash in blankness and my shadow
which stays put like an obedient pet,
no matter how hard I pray to slip out of it,
no matter what I dream.
The inspiration for this “unrequited love” poem is the exposed ensellure because the speaker needs to start with a seed before he can spiral out to encapsulate the magnitude and intensity of desire, of the ache of want. Notice how the poet scatters his gorgeous images (“brocade of rain”; “Keatsian swoons”; stars “awash in blankness”) at strategic intervals, reeling the reader back onto the sensory path before we get lost in the speaker’s wanderings on this lengthy avenue of contemplation.
By the end of the poem, there is something both comforting and unsettling about the speaker’s being left alone (or isolated) with the unattainable and the intangible—light, shadow, absence—as if that is the cruel fate that awaits those who think and over-think matters like fleeting beauty, as if that is the double-edged fortune for those who yearn for what they can’t have.
This is not the only love poem in Paul Guest’s book (a strong follow-up to The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, which won the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize), Keatsian swoons await us at various turns.
(From Notes for My Body Double, published by the University of Nebraska Press/ Bison Books, 2007. Used with the permission of the author.)
A fine book, and we’re proud to have featured two poems from it – “Lullaby” and “Ode” – in the August 2004 issue of Poetry.
this is so beautiful that i am crying, grieving…
how devastating, that moment i realized i was in love with someone who would never reciprocate.
My God…this poem is absolutely brilliant…said as though she is the last to know. After reading this poem by such a wonderful word smith my own paltry words fail me.
Bravo!…simply Bravo!
each star to be wished on / awash in blankness
Awash in blankness, in the dark liquidity of the sky… Indeed a gem within a gem, in two senses of the metaphor!