Paul Guest

In the fall of 2024, I had the honor to take a short class with Paul Guest, who has a quiet, powerful honesty, a profound connection to sound and rhythm, a capacity for economy of language, and a magical way of making surprising, even shocking but always entirely relevant juxtapositions, the foundation of metaphors that call us to life. Indeed, he is a force for life. Here is his beautiful poem, “Walking the Land,” anthologized in Ada Limon’s poetry anthology: You Are Here. Poetry in the Natural World.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/you-are-here-poetry-in-the-natural-world-ada-limon/20274526

Paul Guest

Walking The Land

Because I was terrified, I learned nothing.

I had stepped in a papery nest of ground wasps:

A hateful swarm of them

wreathed up around me and writhed

and sang wordless rage.

One stung me on the neck

and I think I was shocked

more than I was hurt:

afraid of moving even an inch

because that was what the world had become.

I wonder if its frantic sting

was death for the insect whose mind was all red.

I don’t know my mind

So I’m making up a story:

whistling past a graveyard.

Something about a goose,

forever honking and charging, flogging, flying.

My grandfather there

and muscadines in the Georgia heat.

My grandfather smoked Winstons

and what could be ore American

than choosing one’s future

decline. He broke one apart

In his palm, spat into it,

and smeared the poultice over my angry skin.

Would you call it a wound,

I asked a doctor

because there are hurts

That mean so little.

I want to say nothing imprecise.

I want to stand

(like I could, then)

in the pine shade of those trees

and not fill up

with murky nausea, soothed some by nicotine.

This will help,

my grandfather said. Like magic, you wait and see.

Find more of Paul’s work at bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=paul+guest

For his writer’s biography, go to: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/paul-guest

Grady Chambers

Erick Mihaly