Dissonance Royal Traveller
sound opens sound
shank of globe strings floating out
something like images are here
opening up avenues to view a dome
a distant clang reaches the edifice.
understanding what it means
to understand music
cloudless movement beyond the neck’s reach
an hypnotic lull in porcelain water break mimics
tonality crunch of salad under waddling
a small seizure
from monumentality
does not come or go with understanding
the path will end
birdhouse of trembling cotton
or dream expelled it
parcel on the landlocked moor.
explaining music
and their clothes entangled
who walk into a puddle of minnows;
minnows in a bowl
consonant with water.
the drifted footpad
ambushed by reeds signals the listening
oars.
music disappears into oars.
in the middle the world is brown;
on the opposite side of the earth
an aroma of scarlet.
this accompanies our hearing music;
the sleeve of heaven
and the hoof of earth
loosed from their garrison.
dissonance may abandon miserere
on bruised knee hasten to the idol.
and what is consonance—the recluse—
entering and exiting
as often as a monarch butterfly
touches a season;
by accident grips the burning flowers.
in the stops between terror
the moon aflame on its plaza.
autumn of rippling wind
and the noise of baskets
smell of tin fists.
and harsh fists
on the waterfall changing the season;
the horse romps in flax
a cardboard feature
creating a cycle of flax.
music imagines this cardboard
horse in cardboard jacket
flagrant the ragged grove
red summit red.
dissonance royal traveller
altered the red saddle.
Copyright Credit: Barbara Guest, “Dissonance Royal Traveller” from Defensive Rapture, Copyright 1993 by Barbara Guest, Sun & Moon Press, in The Collected Poems by Barbara Guest, Wesleyan University Press and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
Source: The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan University Press, 2008)