C. D. Wright

Is the woman in the pool of light really reading or just staring at what is written Is the man walking in the soft rain naked or is it the rain that makes his shirt transparent The boy in the iron cot is he asleep or still fingering the springs underneath Did you honestly believe three lives could be complete The bottle of green liquid on the sill is it real The bottle on the peeling sill is it filled with green Or is the liquid an illusion of fullness How summer’s children turn into fish and rain softens men How the elements of summer nights bid us to get down with each other on the unplaned floor And this feels painfully beautiful whether or not it will change the world one drop

Valentine's palette is mostly grey. Next comes blue (borage, cobalt, silk, robe, egg). Then white. Some inherent greens. But she draws most often from the greyer end of the grey scale. It could be manifest in a postmortem jaw, dusty glass, a sky, one degree Fahrenheit, a lone sock under a sickbed; the water is grey, and the long wall where one exits a car. Grey is the intermediate state she inhabits with no apparent effort. In the grey space, the bardo, the spirit starts to find shape, to find internal structure.

I love them all. I love that a handful, a mouthful, gets you by, a satchelful can land you a job, a well-chosen clutch of them could get you laid, and that a solitary word can initiate a stampede, and therefore can be formally outlawed—even by a liberal court bent on defending a constitution guaranteeing unimpeded utterance. I love that the Argentine gaucho has over two hundred words for the coloration of horses and the Sami language of Scandinavia has over a thousand words for reindeer based on age, sex, appearance—e.g., a busat has big balls or only one big ball. More than the pristine, I love the filthy ones for their descriptive talent as well as transgressive nature. I love the dirty ones more than the minced, in that I respect extravagant expression more than reserved. I admire reserve, especially when taken to an ascetic nth. I love the particular lexicons of particular occupations. The substrate of those activities. The nomenclatures within nomenclatures. I am of the unaccredited school that believes animals did not exist until Adam assigned them names. My relationship to the word is anything but scientific; it is a matter of faith on my part, that the word endows material substance, by setting the thing named apart from all else.Horse, then, unhorses what is not horse.

In post—World War II America there were several loosely affiliated, overlapping strands of poets who began publishing—poets rejecting the epistemological and anglophile models of W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. They were known variously as the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, and the Black Mountain poets. They came up on the heels of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and along the spur of the Objectivists, aka Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Niedecker, et al. Robert Creeley was the bridge. He distributed the differences and sounded parallel concerns. He began corresponding with Pound and Williams in 1949. He and John Ashbery were seated two desks apart at Harvard. In Majorca, his Divers Press published Robert Duncan and Paul Blackburn. He typed Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which was then mimeographed in an edition of twenty-five. At the now legendary and gone Black Mountain College, he studied with Charles Olson and "earned" his successorship. At Black Mountain Creeley edited the Black Mountain Review(initially from Majorca) and picked up the degree he had managed not to complete at Harvard. Over the years he would edit works of Charles Olson and George Oppen (and Robert Burns and Walt Whitman), as well as anthologies of new American writing. His correspondence was carried on at a rate and level not to be believed. The Olson/Creeley letters alone consume ten volumes (if e-mail had been available to those two the number of volumes might have been squared). He wrote tense stories and a superb short novel along with scores of word-perfect essays. Overall he published in the vicinity of seventy books. Checking a familiar book site, 227 titles are instantly identified with his name. His collaborations with artists including Francesco Clemente, Elsa Dorfman, Sol LeWitt, R.B. Kitaj, and Susan Rothenberg were the occasion of fine-edition books and traveling exhibitions. His collaborations with musicians such as Steve Lacy and Steve Swallow were performed for packed, hip audiences and are featured on numerous recordings. He could and did fill Albert Hall, but he had no qualms about reading to a crowd of four. No qualms, either, about talking extemporaneously in lieu of giving the promoted reading. He was not there to accommodate anyone's prepackaged expectations—he was there to discover the direction of his own thinking. And in that lies, as he often quoted William Carlos Williams, the profundity.

How is it that you live, and what is it you do? — William Wordsworth, to the leech-gatherer Three, no, four, that I know, married women of means and brains. One grew moss on her tongue, waking from dreams that smelled of mildew or hoary socks on a smothering train. One turned to falconry and the construction of seed bombs to be dropped from three- story houses. One burned her burka upon being released from prison for the fourth time shamed so down deep in her molested self, washed henceforth in formal darkness, another burned her wedding dress in a fire pot while house finches splashed in the birdbath. [howone momenttouches on another moment and a thought flickers on and off] One poet, obsessed with vulvae, son of a butcher, displayed a large bezoar on his coffee table, and slept in the bear nests in the d’Ardèche, obsessed. One poet, adopted shortly after birth by a levee builder on the St. Francis, shot himself with a target pistol on a beautiful afternoon in early June. One lay across the tracks on the brink of the Tiananmen uprising. One picked up her manuscript, a block of ash, from the embers of her Oakland home. Bakhtin, as we know, smoked his very best pages in prison. The poems of Radnóti were found by his widow in his overcoat, in a mass grave. One scribbled until his last conscious breath in an apartment in Waltham, brimmed over with hellish fury and dysfunctional passion. One was imprisoned on a ship in Valparaiso during the military coup, but lived with his “iron bad health” to carve a poem 3.5 kilometers long in the Atacama Desert, and another in the skies over Brooklyn; to cover thousands of pages with anguish and light. One is fascinated with lichens and other symbionts. One with fungi and other entheogens. [howthe divine is elusive and pelf is conspicuous] One spent the better part of this life writing in the dirt with a stick, crossing out with his foot, that his entire tribe could decipher the mystery inscribed. [Another surrendered hisyouth and gladness with lines of despondency and madness.] One broke faith with the word before the word could break faith with her, and built a mountain of detergent in her garage. One made a record of night-flying birds on a scroll longer than the roll of post-Katrina homicides in Orleans Parish. One does not like white flowers and has never shown her poems to a single solitary living soul. Another built a pair of metal wings to be worn once and then pressed between the covers of a golden book. One joined the Int’l Concatenated Order of the Hoo-Hoo but absconded for Europe where he lives large as an unaffiliated psychedelic narcissist. Some just want the big life. Others suffer into the night at the thought of what they should have said,un autre esprit d’escalier. One was able to buy his first car after a settlement from being bit by a pit bull. One resolved to trim her hair once she began to sit upon it. One walked alone from Savannah to Santa Monica. The perfect time to read the Bible and Gravity’s Rainbow. One posed under a tortuosa beech at Arnold Arboretum when her picture was taken; wrote longhand crossing the Gulf, got a job statuing in New Orleans. One of the venerated continues to write though his sight has abandoned him and his garden is returning to wilderness. One snores and never locks her doors. One has lamellar ichthyosis and did not shed her collodion membrane. Rare relief springs from poetry and lying flat, cloud-searching on the grass. [howa glass ear is fashioned from words] One poet goes silent as fishes; one stands in a lightning field and slowly begins to move. [asa fugue composed in an open boat] One writes again every thousand+ days and plants all things magenta, so named for the Italian town of that name. One, as a lock against beggary and death, writes only elegies; was advised by a mild elder: It is all right to be depressed just as long as you don’t let it get you down. [howwisteria can bring down a house/likewise cat’s claw] One dreamed of leaving her colicky son under the bleachers. One survived multiple tumors in his brain decades after a year-long tour in Vietnam. Another walked off the uranium fields, survived melanoma and many more unkind cuts,torn awake. How here: [The story has a skip in it. Listen, Señor, I have been used bymy own ignorance, self-disgust, my instinct for failure. Pray for me.] Seen in this light (this damnable dingy light), Brothers and Sisters, Señors y Señoras, I tell you how it is that we live, and what it is that we do, we get ourselves up, off our much abused sofas, Hermanos, Hermanas, to the old intolerable sound of hollow spoons in hollow bowls, to insure that our love has not left the world or else

a bed is left open to a mirror a mirror gazes long and hard at a bed light fingers the house with its own acoustics one of them writes this down one has paper bed of swollen creeks and theories and coils bed of eyes and leaky pens much of the night the air touches arms arms extend themselves to air their torsos turning toward a roll of sound: thunder night of coon scat and vandalized headstones night of deep kisses and catamenia his face by this light: saurian hers: ash like the tissue of a hornets’ nest one scans the aisle of firs the faint blue line of them one looks out: sans serif “Didn’t I hear you tell them you were born on a train” what begins with a sough and ends with a groan groan in which the tongue’s true color is revealed the comb’s sough and the denim’s undeniable rub the chair’s stripped back and muddied rung color of stone soup and garden gloves color of meal and treacle and sphagnum hangers clinging to their coat a soft white bulb to its string the footprints inside us iterate the footprints outside the scratched words return to their sleeves the dresses of monday through friday swallow the long hips of weekends a face is studied like a key for the mystery of what it once opened “I didn’t mean to wake you angel brains” ink of eyes and veins and phonemes the ink completes the feeling a mirror silently facing a door door with no lock no lock the room he brings into you the room befalls you like the fir trees he trues her she nears him like the firs if one vanishes one stays if one stays the other will or will not vanish otherwise my beautiful green fly otherwise not a leaf stirs

the breath               the trees               the bridge the road                  the rain                the sheen the breath               the line                  the skin the vineyard            the fences             the leg the water                the breath             the shift the hair                  the wheels             the shoulder the breath               the lane                the streak the lining                the hour                the reasons the name                the distance          the breath the scent                the dogs                the blear the lungs                the breath             the glove the signal               the turn                  the need the steps                the lights               the door the mouth               the tongue             the eyes the burn                  the burned            the burning

has been written in mud and butter and barbecue sauce. The walls and the floors used to be gorgeous. The socks off-white and a near match. The quince with fire blight but we get two pints of jelly in the end. Long walks strengthen the back. You with a fever blister and myself with a sty. Eyes have we and we are forever prey to each other’s teeth. The torrents go over us. Thunder has not harmed anyone we know. The river coursing through us is dirty and deep. The left hand protects the rhythm. Watch your head. No fires should be unattended. Especially when wind. Each receives a free swiss army knife. The first few tongues are clearly preparatory. The impression made by yours I carry to my grave. It is just so sad so creepy so beautiful. Bless it. We have so little time to learn, so much... The river courses dirty and deep. Cover the lettuce. Call it a night. O soul. Flow on. Instead.

She was changing on the inside it was true what had been written The new syntax of love both sucked and burned The secret clung around them She took in the smell Walking down a road to nowhere every sound was relevant The sun fell behind them now he seemed strangely moved She would take her clothes off for the camera she said in plain english but she wasn’t holding that snake

Three people drinking out of the bottle in the living room. A cold rain. Quiet as a mirror. One of the men stuffs his handkerchief in his coat, climbs the stairs with the girl. The other man is left sitting at the desk with the wine and the headache, turning an old Ellington side over in his mind. And over. He held her like a saxophone when she was his girl. Her tongue trembling at the reed. The man lying next to her now thinks of another woman. Her white breath idling before he drove off. He said something about a spell, watching the snow fall on her shoulders. The musician crawls back into his horn, ancient terrapin at the approach of the wheel.