An Emphasis Falls on Reality by Barbara Guest

An Emphasis Falls on Reality 

Cloud fields change into furniture

furniture metamorphizes into fields

an emphasis falls on reality.

 

"It snowed toward morning," a barcarole

the words stretched severely

 

silhouettes they arrived in trenchant cut

the face of lilies...

 

 

I was envious of fair realism.

 

I desired sunrise to revise itself

as apparition, majestic in evocativeness,

two fountains traced nearby on a lawn....

 

you recall treatments

of 'being' and 'nothingness'

illuminations apt

to appear from variable directions -

they are orderly as motors

floating on the waterway,

 

so silence is pictorial

when silence is real.

 

The wall is more real than shadow

or that letter composed of calligraphy

each vowel replaces a wall

 

a costume taken from space

donated by walls....

 

 

These metaphors may be apprehended after

they have brought their dogs and cats

born on roads near willows,

 

willows are not real trees

they entangle us in looseness,

the natural world spins in green.

 

A column chosen from distance

mounts into the sky while the font

is classical,

 

they will destroy the disturbed font

as it enters modernity and is rare....

 

The necessary idealizing of you reality

is part of the search, the journey

where two figures embrace

 

This house was drawn for them

it looks like a real house

perhaps they will move in today

 

 

into ephemeral dusk and

move out of that into night

selective night with trees,

 

The darkened copies of all trees.