but I am off to see my brother today. I haven't been to this particular place before, so I'm anxious. I'll try to post tonight.
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About Me
- Paul
- Paul Guest is the author of four 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 fourth collection, Because Everything Is Terrible, was published by Diode Editions. His poems have appeared in Harper's, 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 and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
2 comments:
All's quiet on the crush front, eh?
Are you there, Paul? It's me...(this is where I'm supposed to blurt out my name).
She Refers to Herself in the Third Person
She’s tall and exceedingly thin—
okay, not exceedingly—-still, you could, if so inclined
climb her ribs, hip
bones and clavicles prominent enough which to cling.
Her skin is exceedingly pale--albaster
the romantic term—
in her youth she was nicknamed Casper
although she was much too shy
to be considered friendly.
Her eyes, de rigueur, are blue, neither sky nor sea,
yet as changeable if not turbulent.
Her hair’s a mess of blonde curls—
the name on the box proclaims the shade champagne
cocktail but it lifts instead to the faintest
strawberry. Already you’ve conjured
this woman in your head more real-ly
than she can ever be, or will;
therein lies the beauty of this word game.
To you, she’s Emily haunting her house,
writing these poems, letters to you, to the world
at large kept in a box beneath her bed.
She’s gotten too good at keeping secrets, at hiding
behind the panes. She prefers this metaphor
instead: a ladder propped against an unpainted
wall waiting to be scaled, patient
for the missed rung, the inevitable (she hopes
against hope) fall.
Unrelated, but I saw this and thought of your Godzilla poems: :)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=502&ncid=716&e=8&u=/ap/20041130/ap_on_en_mo/godzilla_star
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