Paul Guest’s “A Long Time I’ve Wanted to Say Something”

Thoughts on holding so much.

A Long Time I’ve Wanted to Say Something

A long time I’ve wanted to say something
and not know the next word until
it busied my mouth. Love talk, anger, consolation,
lies, mad hints at the edge of green
water where fish and snakes swam
weirdly away from my lonesome post - 
five dozen kinds of greetings
and one of severance
entered this conversation
I am having with the earth.
O world, I want to love you
better than I do, forgiving
every satellite dish bolted to the roof
and pointed towards the 
ubiquity of the sky,
and all it holds within it like a gravid cloud - 
darkness first of all 
and then the post-mortem flare of the stars,
and fixed between both,
satellites soaking our cells
with beamed, invisible pornography
and all its stark frustrations,
its spacey coupling, its theater of vicious hunger.
How many times have I gone
home through that rain, 
my body perforated by
waves of strange ecstasy?
World, I’ve wanted to box you
on your huge ear, or hide
something from you 
that you badly want, right then, that instant,
this now. I’ve wanted 
to pour you out
until you’re empty,
worth filling up again.
I am not talking to you,
anymore. Tired
as I am of gravity 
and tired as I am
of my bones, the sullen sameness of their pain,
let me just whistle
a sad song
into the newness of the air.
Let me plan out,
let me devise and arrange
and braid one lost
path to the next.
Let me save something from vague peril.
It is all around us,
after all, danger,
or love, or war,
or spontaneous jamborees on a hilltop littered with fiddles.
I am thinking of love.
Which means in my tongue
that I am praying for it
to be saved from never knowing me. 

from My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge (Ecco, 2008)

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I don’t think I’ve ever read a Paul Guest poem that didn’t absolutely stun me. He’s a favorite, for sure. His characterization of the world holds space for so much, whether gratitude, or anger, or cynicism, or hope, or love, or any number of things beautiful or not, opposite or not. All at once. All at fucking once. And the more I think about that, the more I wonder whether that act — the one of holding space for so much — is a kind of definition of acceptance, or trust, or even love.

This poem feels like it enacts that notion tenfold. It reminds me of another favorite of Guest’s work, titled “Love Song with Ruin,” where he writes:

Important, I think,

to accept the testimony of a shadow.

To say it is gospel.

To know there is no need

to make peace with

a world that has no peace.

The wonderful poet Ricky Ray wrote about those lines in a review of Guest’s most recent book, stating:

The poet suggests, perhaps, that shadows not only give testimony to what casts them, but serve as gospel for both presence and the promise of absence that lurks at one’s heel. There’s no need to attempt to make peace—itself a form of struggle—with a world that never claimed to have peace. The claim was always a projection, and when we let go of the projection, we might also find the struggle lifted from our shoulder.

I love this synthesis of those lines, and I love how the lines speak across the pages to today’s poem, where Guest writes:

O world, I want to love you

better than I do…

These lines serve as a kind of volta in this poem — of which there are, I would say, a few. But what I love about these specific lines is that it’s hard to believe in them as anything other than honest. They introduce a kind of generosity that sits alongside so much else as the poem progresses. The generosity multiplies, becomes criticism, cynicism, love! Just notice how, immediately after these lines — lines of want, lines of despair — is a kind of cynical critique of the world and all its satellites and invisibilities. Which is then followed by the lines:

World, I’ve wanted to box you

on your huge ear, or hide

something from you

that badly want…

How wildly human this is, and how remarkable. To move from wanting to love the world better to wishing a kind of wistful violence upon the world. It’s what makes Guest as a speaker in his poems so intoxicating to read. He’s funny. He’s sad. He’s snarky. He’s mean. He’s goddamn wonderful. Campbell McGrath calls him “apocalyptically compassionate.” I often think about the relationship between Guest and the speakers of his poems. How close they are, if they are always the same. Guest was paralyzed at the age of 12 in a bicycle accident, and the book this poem is from names that on the book jacket, in blurbs, and more. But as a poet, Guest sometimes, it seems, plays with whether or not the reader knows this — sometimes he names the accident and its horrifying consequences in his poems, sometimes not. But it is hard, as a reader, to unfeel Guest’s radical generosity regardless.

Generosity is not simply a kind of regurgitated, refurbished happiness or joy. I think it is quite the opposite. I think, when Guest writes “I am not talking to you, / anymore” it is a kind of generosity. It is generous in what it offers to us, as readers — as the poem becomes a poem that holds space for love and want and criticism and, now, fatigue. And when Guest writes that he is no longer talking to the world, well, it turns out that he is. In fact, he begins to beg, to say “let me…let me…let me…”

How many of us are saying the same thing? How many of us still want to love after we fight? How many of us apologize when we know we don’t have to? All those “sorry to bother you’s,” all those “I don’t want to keep you’s.” Those are all parts of a conversation with a world that we want to love better, a world that very rarely, maybe never, responds, a world that “has no peace.” And yet, and yet, and yet. Let us keep asking things of it.

Guest’s generosity is in allowing the reader to witness love turned to anger turned to frustration turned to reluctance, and despair, and fatigue. There are poems of discovery and poems of revelation and poems of pure joy and poems of the rationalization of deep loss. Somehow, this poem embodies these kinds of poems and more. And in the end, finally, as if by miracle, the poem becomes a love poem:

I am thinking of love.

When I read this first time, I looked back at the first three lines:

A long time I’ve wanted to say something
and not know the next word until
it busied my mouth.

I looked at these lines and almost cried. Was it love he wanted to say? And you? Is it love, too?

I don’t know how Guest does it. I really don’t. I’ve read this poem countless times, and the craft of it seems to be in its ability to make every line feel so naturally dependent on the line that came before. It’s like necessary meandering. But deep in that meandering is a mind at the difficult, unfearing, sometimes joyous, nothing-to-lose work of trying to enact what it means to be both in this world and slightly outside of it.

One of the most powerful (and also funny, yes, funny) things about poetry is that it is a medium where you can literally say something like “O world.” Where else does this happen in life other than prayer? Or those nights you spend on the fire escape, or walking through a field, or under the little and lonely street lamp, those nights where you look up at the sky and it feels sentient enough to be listening, and you feel both worthy and worthless enough to talk to it. To talk to the sky. To say “O world.” It’s a beautiful thing, to be able to say that. It’s a poem. It’s also absurd. It’s sad. It’s really sad. It’s hopeful. It’s full of want. It’s an entire mood. When I read and re-read Paul Guest’s poem today, what I recognize the most is its willingness to be all of those things I just mentioned, to refuse to engage in reduction. It’s a poem of un-narrowing. It’s a poem that holds and holds and holds. And that is a gift of generosity. So often we are taught and told to let go. And then here comes this poem with its hands full. I love it.