posts tagged "charles wright"

"It’s all the same dark, it’s all the same absence of dark”
-Charles Wright, from “Thinking About the Poet Larry Levis One Afternoon in Late May"

After a certain age, there’s no one left to turn to.
You’ve got to find Eurydice on your own,
you’ve got
to find the small crack
between here and everywhere else all by yourself.

How could it be otherwise?
Everyone’s gone away, the houses are all empty,
and overcast starts to fill the sky like soiled insulation.
-Charles Wright, “No Direction Home”

Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead.
It has my photograph in its soft pocket.
It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind.

I write poems to unite myself, to do penance and disappear
Through the upper-right-hand corner of things, to say grace.

-Charles Wright, "Reunion"

"What lasts is what you start with.”
-Charles Wright, from “A Journal of Southern Rivers"

Little Foot, 19 by Charles Wright

This is the bird hour, peony blossoms falling bigger than wren hearts
On the cutting border’s railroad ties,
Sparrows and other feathery things
Homing from one hedge to the next,
                          late May, gnat-floating evening.

Is love stronger than unlove?
                                   Only the unloved know.
And the mockingbird, whose heart is cloned and colorless.

And who’s this tiny chirper,
       lost in the loose leaves of the weeping cherry tree?
His song is not more than three feet off the ground, and singular,
And going nowhere.
Listen. It sounds a lot like you, hermano.
                               It sounds like me.

"We’ve all lead raucous lives,
                                some of them inside, some of them out.
But only the poem you leave behind is what’s important.”
-Charles Wright, from “Little Foot (27)"