I Remember

Abstract

I Remember Paul Guest (bio) the early rehearsals of the flesh: fallingfrom a tree in the backyard of a girl whomI didn't love, was a child, had no conceptof what it meant to vibrate with desire,or in the night to ache with the certaintyof ultimate reprisal, no, I was just a boytesting out what happened in the momentfollowing letting go, what the earthimparted to the body upon impact,namely, pain, and a sort of stunned bemusementat an ever enlarging catalogueof betrayals, how, years later, wheneverything had really changedand no longer could I go up into the lowbranches of the tree that gavea bit of shadow to that miniature world,how I'd returned for a birthday partybecause it was polite to acknowledgewe were not divided by grief or war or anythingso final or fatal or dramatic, howI sat beside a pile of old logs burningin a ring of stones and in the flamessaw nothing that amountedto vision or prophecy, just embers and ashes,and all around were strangerssoaking in the little heat, turning wienerson straightened coat-hangers, how thenthat was a kind of impossible delicacy,how I felt my blood move within meeven though I could feel almost nothing else,not the uneven ground beneath meor the autumnal breeze above or the violence of the airwhen her father, drunk and loud,stepped out into the midst of uswith a glass bottle in his hand [End Page 153] and pitched it into the mouth of the fire,when the air inside it expandedand exploded, when he said nothingbut returned inside, having presented his gift to the night. [End Page 154] Paul Guest Paul Guest is the author of three collections of poetry and a memoir. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. A Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting Award winner, he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia. Copyright © 2017 Middlebury College Publications