Guest's poem "A Way of Being" epitomizes the length to which the inferiority of language sometimes spills kernels of ancient attitudes that threaten to mock and ridicule.
“There we go in cars, did you guess we wore sandals?”
Barbara Guest’s poem “A Way of Being” consists of eight free verse paragraphs. In the first verse paragraph, the speaker begins by making a statement and then asking a question in the first line: “There we go in cars, did you guess we wore sandals?” The reader’s first puzzlement sharpens on the question, no doubt, wondering at the prescience of the poet’s perceiving that the reader would be wondering if the occupants of the cars were wearing sandals.
Then the speaker asserts that the occupants of the cars were “Carrying the till, memorizing its numbers,” indicating that the people in the cars were transporting a money-box and that they had committed to memory its contents. The speaker then claims that such was appropriate because they were “at the essential such as rearranging / languages.” Minds that are capable of memorizing large quantities of number are also able to manipulate words.
“I cannot place him.” Yet I do.”
Then the speaker paradoxically claims that she cannot recognize someone, a man presumably, but yet she does so anyway. She finds this a happy coincidence since “He must ascend indefinitely as airs / he must regard his image as plastic.” But she turns to uncertainly again as she realizes that she must have been “adhering to the easeful carpet that needs / footprints and cares for them / as is their wont in houses.” At least the houses they we passing led her to appreciate such a blighted thought.
The speaker then catalogues a possible series of activities that would range within her mind’s eye were she to experience “Such a day/or such a night / reeling from cabin to cabin / looking at the cakewalk or merely dancing.” The speaker asserts that in such “adventures in broad/or slim lamplight” even the cars “do not cheat, even their colors perform in storm”—a fact for which the speaker is eternally grateful.
“The old manse and robins. One tear”
Half-way through the poem, the speaker embellishes her accumulation of wisdom that riding in cars and memorizing the money-box contents have afforded her, and still she complains: “Even as your glance / through the windshield tells me you’ve seen / another mishap of nature.” The “mishap of nature” is that “we have escaped / the charm of being native.”
But the speaker is not deterred by any misfortune natural or supernatural as she would “prefer to be like him near the hearth,” and she would eventually come to comprehend that nothing is as ambiguous as being “where woodsmoke makes a screen of numbers and signs.” She admits that she would not “willingly forget.”
“The plateau, excursionist, / is ahead”
And if the “plateau, excursionist” could apprehend the speaker’s mutitudinal forbearance, she would skirt the issue but still be able to admonish the others “After that twenty volumes / of farmland.” But the speaker is still the one who truly understands the landscape, and she is not reluctant to “guide us / to the wood garage someone has whitened.” Because of the whitening, they can detect that “the light enters through one window / like a novel.”
The speaker then gives a strong command: “You must peer at it / without weakening.” The reader may interpret the command in two ways: (1) If you look closely you may seem to be staring, but you are probably just becoming alarmed. (2) You may become weak if you stare long enough and seem to be alarmed as you stare. Either way works because in the end they have discovered that they are “as far from the twilight ring / the slow sunset, the quick dark.” Therefore the speaker will be able to leave the poem without “Understanding the distances / between characters,” as she had started to do in the beginning.
