Barbara Guest & The New Mysterium

It's been a long time since I discovered a poet as momentously fresh and original as Barbara Guest--one of the main members of the New York School in the 1950s. Like Jack Spicer, her voice breathes, sings, speaks a new mysterium of language. Here is one of her early poems--an astonishment called

THE HERO LEAVES HIS SHIP

I wonder if this new reality is going to destroy me.
There under the leaves a loaf
The brick wall on it someone has put bananas
The bricks have come loose under the weight,
What a precarious architecture these apartments,
As giants once in a garden. Dear roots
Your slivers repair my throat when anguish
commences to heat and glow.

From the water
A roar. The sea has its own strong wrist
The green turf is made of shells
it is new.

I am about to use my voice
Why am I afraid that salty wing
Flying over a real hearth will stop me?

Yesterday the yellow
Tokening clouds. I said "no" to my burden,
The shrub planted on my shoulders. When snow
Falls or in rain, birds gather there
In the short evergreen. They repeat their disastrous
Beckoning songs as if the earth
Were rich and many warriors coming out of it,
As if the calm was blue, one sky over
A shore and the tide welcoming a fleet
Bronzed and strong as breakers,

Their limbs in this light
Fused of sand and wave are lifted once
Then sunk under the aquamarine, the phosphorous.
Afterwards this soundless bay,
Gulls fly over it. The dark is mixed
With Wings. I ask if the house is real,
If geese drink at the pond, if the goatherd takes
To the mountain, if the couple love and sup,

I cross the elemental stations
from windy field to still close. Good night I go to my bed.
The roof will hold me. Outside the gods survive.

--Barbara Guest, from "The Location of Things" in "The Collected Poetry of Barbara Guest," Wesleyan University Press, Middleton, Connecticut, 2008.

This is one of the most beautiful and powerful initiation poems I have ever read. The hero of course is the poet, or artist, finally launching into his craft, leaving the ship to explore the strange or perhaps appointed land to which he/she has been sent. But these days, the initiation can be into Sufi or Buddhist or Christian orders--bidden by a new day of perception under the aegis of love or wisdom. At the top of the gang plank, scanning the harbor, or shore, or perhaps already having set firm foot in the word ashore, anyone would ask, "I wonder if this new reality is going to destroy me."

Immediately, the hero's gunslinger-adroit senses and heightened powers of observation suggest a need for alertness, something amiss beneath the glib surface of things.
There under the leaves a loaf
The brick wall on it someone has put bananas
The bricks have come loose under the weight,
What a precarious architecture these apartments,

Imagine apprehension based on bunches of bananas placed on a garden brick wall; imagine noticing something so sturdy buckling under the weight of something so sensuous and gratifying. The hero magnifies the slight disturbance--or projection of her own hesitation--into something almost oafishly, comically threatening: "giants once in a garden." Then, by dint of training and faith in perception, the hero surrenders all apprehensions in a gratitude to that garden:
Dear roots
Your slivers repair my throat when anguish
commences to heat and glow.

First test passed.

But, remember this is an initiation. Other tests lie nested in immediate profusion. From behind, the hero hears the sea's sudden strong roar and the familiar Dover Beach hiss of mighty surf dragging in or strumming shells whose noise (annoys) that break the surf-ace of things. Nevertheless, the initiation must go on: "I am about to use my voice." Understand that as a poet, the author means here that she is about to add her presence to the landscape, then become a constituent of the place. Such surrender and trust are still daunting:
Why am I afraid that salty wing
Flying over a real hearth will stop me?

How many heroes have succumbed to the need for the old familiars, the old comforts? The poet remembers shirking her duty and the invitation to be a fully vested perceptual partner in the place, or what could be called life at hand:
Yesterday the yellow
Tokening clouds. I said "no" to my burden,
The shrub planted on my shoulders.

I love the confession, "I said 'no' to my burden." Incredibly, the invitation to disembark was one that was like some Odyssean temptation in its lyrical beauty:
When snow
Falls or in rain, birds gather there
In the short evergreen. They repeat their disastrous
Beckoning songs as if the earth
Were rich and many warriors coming out of it,
The birds aren't doves or if they are their song is still a "disastrous / Beckoning" To what? A rich earth with "many warriors coming out of it." Aren't those warriors accomplices in strength? Why is the poet worried by them? Everything the poet imagines is an invitation to participate in a perceptual prowess.
As if the calm was blue, one sky over
A shore and the tide welcoming a fleet
Bronzed and strong as breakers,

It's his fleet, it's his strength, yet at this point it still seems "other" and threatening.
Their limbs in this light
Fused of sand and wave are lifted once
Then sunk under the aquamarine, the phosphorous.
Afterwards this soundless bay,
Gulls fly over it.
This drowning is a baptism. The "soundless bay" into which the warriors have sunk is the union of seer and seen; yet, as my teacher said over and over, when a person is still a seed that clings to its confining husk that cannot be sundered, the oak-like immensity still locked to bursting within is terrifying.

It is night now. And the slow disappearance and merging of things into that unity is ineluctable. Yet notice the sound of wings, that talismannic fluttering, as if a penumbra, of strength and power:
The dark is mixed
With Wings.

The hero will take shelter in the town, but first a few last diversionary questionings, the last remnants of reluctance expressed as hopes for a kind of guaranteed domesticity in the new mysterium:
I ask if the house is real,
If geese drink at the pond, if the goatherd takes
To the mountain, if the couple love and sup,

Now comes the initiation, this time as simple, supple inhabitance of place:
I cross the elemental stations
from windy field to still close. Good night I go to my bed.
The roof will hold me. Outside the gods survive.

I love the youthful confidence at the end:
The roof will hold me. Outside the gods survive.
The gift of the initiation is to experience the unconditional intactness of the world. This is the glorious end of the hero's first day on shore. God's in his heaven; all's right with the world.