Paul Guest > Quotes

“Beside you I failed to dream of anything else.”
― Paul Guest, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge

“When I say to you,
I have seen the black floor of the ocean,
you should know better
than to believe me in that moment.
My heart was broken, then,
and my arms were no good
at all. These words are what was left
of my breath. I am
so very tired of time and of waiting
for nothing to change.”
― Paul Guest

“Here is the topography of false starts. Here
a whole constellation is lousy with desire.
Here what passes for love is the same
as anywhere. Here no one has said
a prayer for the stars, and here no one
comes, except to leave, except to stay
long enough to bruise.”
― Paul Guest, The Resurrection of The Body and The Ruin of The World

“And there are nights
when I can’t speak,
not even to the wind
in the strange tongue of the dark pine trees.”
― Paul Guest, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge

“What will I do with my days
now that my nights
are sublimely alone
and how will I make use of this wound
I carried like a map
so that I would never, never
lose you?

from “In Praise of the Defective”
― Paul Guest, Notes for My Body Double

“I’m learning
geography is about loss
and so I keep moving”
― Paul Guest, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge

“I’m learning
geography is about loss
and so I keep moving
into closets that never smell like you.
I’m learning not to order
everything and want nothing.
My mouth is empty. The words won’t stay.

— Paul Guest, from “Airport Letter 2,” My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge (Ecco, 2008)”
― Paul Guest, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge

“Like love.
Here I am, waiting on the night
to press up against the world
as though all stillness were penitence.
Or practice for your arrival.
For your body. For the sum of all your cells.

from “Eros Poetica”
― Paul Guest, Because Everything Is Terrible

“Maybe you need to embrace disappointment.
The way you don’t sleep at night,
dreaming of dry dust on furniture
and the pleasant odor of plywood
and what it feels like to peel skin off
of your thumb. Maybe you should begin
that perfect novel which will
save you. Pluck you from the ruddy jaws
of a monster that is right there
beyond your failing sight. Not today,
Satan, or Ronald Reagan—
you learn that often enough evil is not about
nuance. It was raining
the day I was born
and years later I haven’t learned much more
about the stars: fire
and cold light afloat in the murk of the cosmos.
Last night I read about
the doctors who removed 526 teeth
from a boy’s dying jaw:
hours in they feared there was no end to it.
That his pain was infinite.
Their hands trapped.
Bits of white bone arrayed in a spiral
beside his sleeping face
and it was lovely and an evidence of the divine.
Well, not really. Maybe you
aren’t real, aren’t listening to the wind
as it goes through the night
like a sad prayer beneath the stippled sky.
Maybe. Just maybe things will get better.
Give it a year.”
― Paul Guest

“No, I didn’t wait for you
or sleep much at all
or raise one hope like a rag to wipe my lost face.”
― Paul Guest, Notes for My Body Double

“I don’t know how
to free my hear

— Paul Guest, from “Presumptive Elegy for Ken,” The Southern Review (Vol. 56. no. 4, Autumn 2020)”
― Paul Guest

“Something lost somewhere
inside you, untraceable, sinking,
and even at her heart’s request
you’d never pluck a single shining coin
from behind her ear, the warm shell of all her sound,
in which you heard the ocean
rolling away in bracing violence.
In which more of you began to sink and be lost.
In which and in which
and this was enough
to put your lips to the door and not know why.
Not really. Not while rain
held its court in the world
and even in the noon darkness
the day gleamed with water on its face.

—Paul Guest, from “Elegiac Forecast,” My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge (Ecco, 2008)”
― Paul Guest, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge

“Tonight, after love–
and what is a night without it
but darkness,
and what is love without this night
but more darkness?–
I will sing to you.
I will recite to you
the genealogy of shadows,
revealing the ease of their coupling
and, in turn, our own,
softly attended by
the lustrous choir of fireflies
outside our window,
who wait for a word
to rise and take wing,

— Paul Guest, from “Small Wonder,” The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World: Poems (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2003)”
― Paul Guest, The Resurrection of The Body and The Ruin of The World