Love Song with Ruin, and: Eros Poetica, and: Sincerely, and: Invocation, and: Forget

• Love Song with Ruin
• Paul Guest (bio)

I've been thinking about thinking aboutobliteration, again, the time, all of it,I spent swept up in its romance.Dust before a broom's baleen maw. Circuitof the second hand which, even now,holds a magic or a beautyin its indifferent grasp. Easy thoughts,which on a lesser day, onethat had none of this late lightor the hum of the wind,would, or should, fix me with incredulousshame. For my own brain,floating in fluid laze,content to let the gardenforget itself. For my own hands,busied with buttons,keying the codes of indolence.Important, I think,to accept the testimony of a shadow.To say it is gospel.To know there is no needto make peace witha world that has no peace.About bombs I was dreamingand Dresden, drainedof the colors of ruin,newsreel footage flickering insidemy sleeping mind.And then in your armsI returned to thisworld, awake, an old war dropping away.Just the tonnageof sleep, receding,and I felt the need to say farewell.To mark the moment,even with dawn and its idiopathic dumbness.But there you were,asleep, in need of none of thisembellishment. WhenI kissed your forehead,I dreamed I dreamedyour dreams, that I slept your sleep.

Paul Guest

"These were unexpected poems, written soon after completing my last collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge. A brief silence usually falls on my writing life after I finish a project, either because the gas tank is empty or, more probably, because I just don't know what to do next. It feels a little like being lost. But these poems dragged me back to the keyboard and surprised me with their urgencies. They were the documents of new love and a new direction."

Paul Guest is the author of three volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, the Kenyon Review and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco in May 2010. The recipient of a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Copyright © 2010 The Curators of the University of Missouri

• Eros Poetica
• Paul Guest (bio)

Always bad form to say, to announce, this isa poem, though I'm not sure why, as ifthe few of us here with me in these linesmight have ever thought it anythingelse: a letter or guide to constructingsomething improbable, without discernibleparts, like love. Here I am, waitingon the night to press up againstthe world as though all my stillnesswere penitence. Or practicefor your arrival, for your body,the sum of all your cells, the billionswhich you are. This is a poembut a poem is also your hairin the night, barely different, one from the other,your hair in the composed nightabove the bed. Bad form ormanners or rhetoric or what,I don't know, to say soplainly some simple thing likethe sun droppingpast the rim of sightis red because of particulate in the air.Or the moon burns allnight because of stolenlight, that the tides stirin its burning parlor trick.But all this is trueand soundly unromanticand has hardly any placein the stuff of poems,except that in thinking of youall else fails the testof artifice. No longer is thereany use in pretendingone thing is another. I'm tired of metaphor.I want you, whether your souland mine are some elusiveshade or...