Martha Ronk

  from “A Foreign Substance”

             “Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights,” one of Barbara Guest’s most famous poems, begins where the title begins looking over gardens, night lights, buildings, parking lot trucks. Stanza two begins with an enigmatic pronoun without a clear antecedent:

            Wild gardens overlooked by night lights. Parking

            lot trucks overlooked by night lights. Buildings

            with their escapes overlooked by lights

            They urge me to seek here on the heights

            amid the electrical lighting that self who exists,

            who witnesses light and fears its expunging,

What follows is an ekphrastic rearrangement in which the speaker removes a landscape painting from the wall and replaces it with a scene from “The Tale of Genji,” an episode where Genji recognizes his son. This action rescues the speaker from immobility and allows her to be “mobile like a spirit,” traveling in and out of the story, the picture, the emotional configurations of the episode itself; and it also seems as if the Genji move outside their reality (“their screen dismantled”) into the space of the speaker, “that modern wondering space/flash lights from the wild gardens.”

                    from The Chicago Review, 2007