Charles Wright

“Language is the element of definition, the defining and descriptive incantation. It puts the coin between our teeth. It whistles the boat up. It shows us the city of light across the water. Without language there is no poetry, without poetry there’s just talk. Talk is cheap and proves nothing. Poetry is dear and difficult to come by. But it poles us across the river and puts a music in our ears. It moves us to contemplation. And what we contemplate, what we sing our hymns to and offer our prayers to, is what will reincarnate us in the natural world, and what will be our one hope for salvation in the What’sToCome.”

“How many years have slipped through our hands?
At least as many as the constellations we still can identify.
The quarter moon, like a light skiff,
                                                         floats out of the mist-remnants
Of last night’s hard rain.
It, too, will slip through our fingers
                                                        with no ripple, without us in it.”

“...may we not be strangers in the lush province of joy”

“What makes us leave what we love best?What is it inside us that keeps erasing itselfWhen we need it most,That sends us into uncertainty for its own sakeAnd holds us flush there until we begin to love itAnd have to begin again?What is it within our own lives we decline to liveWhenever we find it, making our days unendurable,And nights almost visionless?I still don't know yet, but I do it.”

“The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.”

“It may not be written in any book, but it is written—You can’t go back,you can’t repeat the unrepeatable.”

“Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.Moon-fingers lay down their same routineOn the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.I want to be bruised by God.I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.I want to be entered and picked clean.And the wind says “What?” to me.And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me.And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.And the gears notch and the engines wheel.”

“ToadstoolsThe toadstools are starting to comeup, circular and dry.Nothing will touch them,Gophers or chipmunks, wasps or swallows.They glow in the twilight like rooted will-o’-the-wisps.Nothing will touch them.As though little roundabouts from the bunched unburiable,Powers, dominions,As though orphans rode herd in the short grass, as though they had heard the call,They will always be with us, transcenders of the world.Someone will try to stick his beak into their otherworldly styrofoam.Someone may try to taste a taste of forever.For some it’s a refuge, for some a shady place to fall down.Grief is a floating barge-boat, who knows where it’s going to moor?”

“Snub end of a dismal year, deep in the dwarf orchard, The sky with its undercoat of blackwash and point stars,I stand in the dark and answer toMy life, this shirt I want to take off,which is on fire . . .”

“How many times can summer turn to fall in one life?”

“We've all led raucous lives, some of them inside, some of them out. But only the poem you leave behind is what's important. Everyone knows this. The voyage into the interior is all that matters, Whatever your ride. Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read. Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times His own weight a day just to stay alive. Now that's a life on the edge.”

“Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world.Morning arrives and that's it.Sunlight darkens the earth.”