counts comma it might seem one writing life
is done with once we’ve reached the place where what
astounds anew dash old complexities
arising from a blurred reaction to
some given scene resembling cloudlight on
a ruin or four buffaloes getting rinsed
in a brown river dash had after all
its origin in humid aerodromes
at midnight in southeastern portions of
the atlas waiting with the children for
the next Dakota colon where with stars
gone soft above or noon trampling on shadows
can data be unearthed to rectify
a theme gone suspect question mark what if
the in inverted commas schedule planned
to test interpretations of the lost
finds references on from then to now
and later shaken down to only one
conclusion question mark dreams have their own
vocabulary comma designate
another truth each time pointing the gaze
in cycles to a stale experience
full stop close survey may provide distilled
interrogation of the motive like
a sandstone avatar or mango branch
the way a moat now grazed by oxen rings
a site arrived at after years of longing
dash journals pored over tired in twilight since
the artist armed with bias saunters out
plundering what communities of faith
built for to forge subjective patterns which
convey all the same elegies full stop
bird cries now echo into silence round
grey basreliefs and sunsplit courtyards till
eventual proportions start to curdle
about the involving I making the new
unknown a newer memory full stop
what’s been derived from yellowed pamphlets helps
only in part dash even photographs
must cheat because you have to pace the thing
out for yourselves and sense uneven steps
comma a mediaeval play of sun
down far symmetric cloisters comma see
firsthand the blackening waste of rain along
those crumbling arcades full stop at first
not even pillagers full stop the splendour
went unremembered if at times huntsmen
intent on shooting monkeys down from trees
rooted in towers stumbled across paved floors
laid in oblivion and failed to find
some boles too angular dash otherwise
between haphazard expeditions only
the scrape of cobras over brickwork comma
a leopard’s cough and the perpetual shove
of vegetation through the cracks full stop
ah may the ashes of forgotten sculptors
windswept arrange a spectral advocate
to arraign the gods they chiselled and produce
the battered finery as proof although
each statue hides a secret with its smile
because the done is still the thing which counts
comma response to problems of technique
which argues setting up against the murk
a witness to the self though self is doomed
full stop peripheries of anguish where
a limited hand cuts one crisp lintel full
of dancers comma legends comma flowers
may well exclude the stellar order or
conceal the desolation comma fear
of failure comma nothing rounded off
full stop lianas of the passing night
scrawl commentaries on what has been achieved
but cannot mask a proven impetus
nor punctuate an unspelt myth full stop

 

Copyright © Harry Guest, 2005.

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Harry Guest was born in Wales in 1932 and lives in Exeter with his wife, Lynn Guest, a historical novelist. His Collected Poems 1955-2000, A Puzzling Harvest, appeared from Anvil in 2002.