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Jacket 16 — March 2002   |   # 16  Contents   |   Homepage   |  Catalog   |    

Angel Hair feature

Barbara Guest: Homage


Cover of Angel Hair anthology

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‘A New Era of the Plastic
Arts has begun.’

                     — Kiesler

The world
is going upstairs
and some people
of whom Frederick Kiesler
didn’t approve

are sitting in the basement.

Galaxies galaxies
you are our last jewels
the ones the Czar gave us
and we preserved
in our ateliers

Preferring to drive
taxicabs
and knowing
we had a secret
(able to live gracefully
in tenements)

We simply waited
a fresh morning
that was bound one day
to open
over the roofs

And we see dawn
as a palace.

Having in sleep
experienced
original dreams
which now become
an environment

So we climb
into it
in the night suit
trusting to place
one foot on
‘the cornerstone of the edifice’

No longer
‘traditional’
or ‘isolated’
Whose edges
border on
a scheme
accurate as stone

Whose edges
no longer rough
surround us
(on the walks
to commence our future
in another scale)

Galaxy I see you hanging
from the ceiling

You are our bartered bride
with your grand
comatose
skeleton

Because you are edifice
and bestowed on you is
a ‘coat of arms’

Which you
regally loan
dividing it
into weightless halves

Making your entrances
from the moon

from Angel Hair 5, Spring 1968


Barbara Guest’s author notes page here on the Jacket site offers a biographical note, and also links to a dozen or so Jacket pages that feature her work or reviews of her books, or where she is interviewed.


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