Darkened by time, the masters, like our memories, mix And mismatch, and settle about our lawn furniture, like air Without a meaning, like air in its clear nothingness.
They ruffle our hair, they ruffle the leaves of the August trees. Then stop, abruptly as wind. The flies come back, and the heat— what can we say to them? Nothing is endless but the sky. The flies come back, and the afternoon Teeters a bit on its green edges, then settles like dead weight Next to our memories, and the pale hems of the masters’ gowns. ________ Those who look for the Lord will cry out in praise of him. Perhaps. And perhaps not— dust and ashes though we are, Some will go wordlessly, some Will listen their way in with their mouths Where pain puts them, an inch-and-a-half above the floor. And some will revile him out of love and deep disdain. The gates of mercy, like an eclipse, darken our undersides. Rows of gravestones stay our steps, August humidity Bright as auras around our bodies. And some will utter the words, speaking in fear and tongues, Hating their garments splotched by the flesh. These are the lucky ones, the shelved ones, the twice-erased. ________ Dante and John Chrysostom Might find this afternoon a sidereal roadmap, A pilgrim’s way ... You might too Under the prejaundiced outline of the quarter moon, Clouds sculling downsky like a narrative for whatever comes, What hasn’t happened to happen yet Still lurking behind the stars, 31 August 1995 ... The afterlife of insects, space graffiti, white holes In the landscape, such things, such avenues, lead to dust And handle our hurt with ease. Sky blue, blue of infinity, blue waters above the earth: Why do the great stories always exist in the past? ________ The unexamined life’s no different from the examined life— Unanswerable questions, small talk, Unprovable theorems, long-abandoned arguments— You’ve got to write it all down. Landscape or waterscape, light-length on evergreen, dark sidebar Of evening, you’ve got to write it down. Memory’s handkerchief, death’s dream and automobile, God’s sleep, you’ve still got to write it down, Moon half-empty, moon half-full, Night starless and egoless, night blood-black and prayer-black, Spider at work between the hedges, Last bird call, toad in a damp place, tree frog in a dry ... ________ We go to our graves with secondary affections, Second-hand satisfaction, half-souled, star charts demagnetized. We go in our best suits. The birds are flying. Clouds pass. Sure we’re cold and untouchable, but we harbor no ill will. No tooth tuned to resentment’s fork, we’re out of here, and sweet meat. Calligraphers of the disembodied, God’s word-wards, What letters will we illuminate? Above us, the atmosphere, The nothing that’s nowhere, signs on, and waits for our beck and call. Above us, the great constellations sidle and wince, The letters undarken and come forth, Your X and my X. The letters undarken and they come forth. ________ Eluders of memory, nocturnal sleep of the greenhouse, Spirit of slides and silences, Invisible Hand, Witness and walk on. Lords of the discontinuous, lords of the little gestures, Succor my shift and save me ... All afternoon the rain has rained down in the mind, And in the gardens and dwarf orchard. All afternoon The lexicon of late summer has turned its pages Under the rain, abstracting the necessary word. Autumn’s upon us. The rain fills our narrow beds. Description’s an element, like air or water. That’s the word. Read More MORE POEMS BY CHARLES WRIGHT
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award "Black Zodiac" offers poems suffused with spiritual longing ;lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality.
The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who "sounds like nobody else."
