Charles Wright

Ancient of Days, old friend, no one believes you’ll come back. No one believes in his own life anymore. The moon, like a dead heart, cold and unstartable, hangs by a thread At the earth’s edge, Unfaithful at last, splotching the ferns and the pink shrubs. In the other world, children undo the knots in their tally strings. They sing songs, and their fingers blear. And here, where the swan hums in his socket, where bloodroot And belladonna insist on our comforting, Where the fox in the canyon wall empties our hands, ecstatic for more, Like a bead of clear oil the Healer revolves through the night wind, Part eye, part tear, unwilling to recognize us.

The spider, juiced crystal and Milky Way, drifts on his web through the night sky And looks down, waiting for us to ascend ... At dawn he is still there, invisible, short of breath, mending his net. All morning we look for the white face to rise from the lake like a tiny star. And when it does, we lie back in our watery hair and rock.

Three years ago, in the afternoons, I used to sit back here and try To answer the simple arithmetic of my life, But never could figure it— This object and that object Never contained the landscape nor all of its implications, This tree and that shrub Never completely satisfied the sum or quotient I took from or carried to, nor do they do so now, Though I'm back here again, looking to calculate, Looking to see what adds up. Everything comes from something, only something comes from nothing, Lao Tzu says, more or less. Eminently sensible, I say, Rubbing this tiny snail shell between my thumb and two fingers. Delicate as an earring, it carries its emptiness like a child It would be rid of. I rub it clockwise and counterclockwise, hoping for anything Resplendent in its vocabulary or disguise— But one and one make nothing, he adds, endless and everywhere, The shadow that everything casts.

Thanksgiving, dark of the moon. Nothing down here in the underworld but vague shapes and black holes, Heaven resplendent but virtual Above me, trees stripped and triple-wired like Irish harps. Lights on Pantops and Free Bridge mirror the eastern sky. Under the bridge is the river, the red Rivanna. Under the river’s redemption, it says in the book, It says in the book, Through water and fire the whole place becomes purified, The visible by the visible, the hidden by what is hidden.

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 untie myself, to do penance and disappear Through the upper right-hand corner of things, to say grace.

Midmorning like a deserted room, apparition Of armoire and table weights, Oblongs of flat light, the rosy eyelids of lovers Raised in their ghostly insurrection, Decay in the compassed corners beating its black wings, Late June and the lilac just ajar. Where the deer trail sinks down through the shadows of blue spruce, Reeds rustle and bow their heads, Creek waters murmur on like the lamentation of women For faded, forgotten things. And always the black birds in the trees, Always the ancient chambers thudding inside the heart. _________ Swallow pure as a penknife slick through the insected air. Swallow poised on the housepost, beakful of mud and a short straw. Swallow dun-orange, swallow blue, mud purse and middle arch, Home sweet home. Swallow unceasing, swallow unstill At sundown, the mother's shade over silver water. At the edge of the forest, no sound in the grey stone, No moan from the blue lupin. The shadows of afternoon begin to gather their dark robes And unlid their crystal eyes. Minute by minute, step by slow step, Like the small hand on a clock, we climb north, toward midnight. _________ I've made a small hole in the silence, a tiny one, Just big enough for a word. And when I rise from the dead, whenever that is, I'll say it. I can't remember the word right now, But it will come back to me when the northwest wind blows down off Mt. Caribou The day that I rise from the dead, whenever that is. Sunlight, on one leg, limps out to the meadow and settles in. Insects fall back inside their voices, Little fanfares and muted repeats, Inadequate language of sorrow, inadequate language of silted joy, As ours is. The birds join in. The sunlight opens her other leg. _________ At times the world falls away from us with all its disguises, And we are left with ourselves As though we were dead, or otherwised, our lips still moving, The empty distance, the heart Like a votive little-red-wagon on top of a child's grave, Nothing touching, nothing close. A long afternoon, and a long rain begins to fall. In some other poem, angels emerge from their cold rooms, Their wings blackened by somebody's dream. The rain stops, the robin resumes his post. A whisper Out of the clouds and here comes the sun. A long afternoon, the robin flying from post back to post. _________ The length of vowel sounds, by nature and by position, Count out the morning's meters— bird song and squirrel bark, creek run, The housefly's languor and murmurous incantation. I put on my lavish robes And walk at random among the day's dactyls and anapests, A widening caesura with each step. I walk through my life as though I were a bookmark, a holder of place, An overnight interruption in somebody else's narrative. What is it that causes this? What is it that pulls my feet down, and keeps on keeping my eyes fixed to the ground? Whatever the answer, it will start the wolf pack down from the mountain, The raven down from the tree. _________ Time gnaws on our necks like a dog gnaws on a stew bone. It whittles us down with its white teeth, It sends us packing, leaving no footprints on the dust-dour road. That's one way of putting it. Time, like a golden coin, lies on our tongue's another. We slide it between our teeth on the black water, ready for what's next. The white eyelids of dead boys, like flushed birds, flutter up At the edge of the timber. Domestic lupin Crayolas the yard. Slow lopes of tall grasses Southbound in the meadow, hurled along by the wind. In wingbeats and increments, The disappeared come back to us, the soul returns to the tree. _________ The intermittent fugues of the creek, saying yes, saying no, Master music of sunlight And black-green darkness under the spruce and tamaracks, Lull us and take our breath away. Our lips form fine words, But nothing comes out. Our lips are the messengers, but nothing can come out. After a day of high winds, how beautiful is the stillness of dusk. Enormous silence of stones. Illusion, like an empty coffin, that something is missing. Monotonous psalm of underbrush and smudged flowers. After the twilight, darkness. After the darkness, darkness, and then what follows that. _________ The unborn own all of this, what little we leave them, St. Thomas's hand returning repeatedly to the wound, Their half-formed mouths irrepressible in their half-sleep, Asking for everything, and then some. Already the melancholy of their arrival Swells like a sunrise and daydream over the eastern ridge line. Inside the pyrite corridors of late afternoon, Image follows image, clouds Reveal themselves, and shadows, like angels, lie at the feet of all things. Chambers of the afterlife open deep in the woods, Their secret hieroglyphics suddenly readable With one eye closed, then with the other. _________ One star and a black voyage, drifting mists to wish on, Bullbats and their lullabye— Evening tightens like an elastic around the hills. Small sounds and the close of day, As if a corpse had risen from somewhere deep in the meadow And walked in its shadows quietly. The mouth inside me with its gold teeth Begins to open. No words appear on its lips, no syllables bubble along its tongue. Night mouth, silent mouth. Like drugged birds in the trees, angels with damp foreheads settle down. Wind rises, clouds arrive, another night without stars.

I sit where I always sit, in back of the Buddha, Red leather wing chair, pony skin trunk under my feet, Sky light above me, Chinese and Indian rugs on the floor. 1 March, 1998, where to begin again? Over there's the ur-photograph, Giorgio Morandi, glasses pushed up on his forehead, Looking hard at four objects— Two olive oil tins, one wine bottle, one flower vase, A universe of form and structure, The universe constricting in front of his eyes, angelic orders And applications scraped down To paint on an easel stand, some in the frame, some not. Bologna, my friend, Bologna, world's bit and world's end. _________ It's only in darkness you can see the light, only From emptiness that things start to fill, I read once in a dream, I read in a book under the pink Redundancies of the spring peach trees. Old fires, old geographies. In that case, make it old, I say, make it singular In its next resurrection, White violets like photographs on the tombstone of the yard. Each year it happens this way, each year Something dead comes back and lifts up its arms, puts down its luggage And says—in the same costume, down-at-heels, badly sewn— I bring you good news from the other world. _________ One hand on the sun, one hand on the moon, both feet bare, God of the late Mediterranean Renaissance Breaststrokes across the heavens. Easter, and all who've been otherwised peek from their shells, Thunderheads gathering at the rear abyss of things, Lightning, quick swizzle sticks, troubling the dark in-between. You're everything that I'm not, they think, I'll fly away, Lord, I'll fly away. April's agnostic and nickel-plated and skin deep, Glitter and bead-spangle, haute couture, The world its runway, slink-step and glide. Roll the stone slowly as it vogues and turns, roll the stone slowly. _________ Well, that was a month ago. May now, What's sure to arrive has since arrived and been replaced, Snick-snack, lock and load, grey heart's bull's-eye, A little noon music out of the trees, a sonatina in green. Spring passes. Across the room, on the opposite wall, A 19 th century photograph Of the Roman arena in Verona. Inside, stone tiers and stone gate. Over the outer portico, the ghost of Catullus at sky's end. The morning and evening stars never meet, nor summer and spring: Beauty has been my misfortune, hard journey, uncomfortable resting place. Whatever it is I have looked for Is tiny, so tiny it can dance in the palm of my hand. _________ This is the moment of our disregard— just after supper, Unseasonable hail in huddles across the porch, The dogs whimpering, thunder and lightning eddying off toward the east, Nothing to answer back to, nothing to dress us down. Thus do we slide into our disbelief and disaffection, Caught in the weeds and understory of our own lives, Bad weather, bad dreams. Proper attention is our refuge now, our perch and our praise. So? So. The moon has its rain-ring auraed around it— The more that we think we understand, the less we see, Back yard becoming an obelisk Of darkness into the sky, no hieroglyphs, no words to the wise.

There is a heaviness between us, Nameless, raised from the void, that counts out the sprung hours. What ash has it come to purify? What disappearance, like water, does it lift up to the clouds? God of my fathers, but not of mine, You are a part, it is said, an afterthought, a scattered one. There is a disappearance between us as heavy as dirt. What figure of earth and clay would it have me become? Sunday again, January thaw back big time. The knock-kneed, overweight boys and girls Sit on the sun-warmed concrete sidewalk outside the pharmacy Smoking their dun-filtered cigarettes. Nothing is bothering them—and their nicotine dreams— This afternoon. Everything's weightless, As insubstantial as smoke. Nothing is disappearing in their world. Arrival is all. There is a picture of Yves Klein leaping out of a window Above a cobblestone Paris street. A man on a bicycle peddles away toward the distance. One of them's you, the other is me. Cut out of the doctored photograph, however, the mesh net Right under the swan-diving body. Cut out of another print, the black-capped, ever-distancing cyclist, as well as the mesh net. Hmm . . . And there you have it, two-fingered sleight-of-hand man. One loses one's center in the air, trying to stay afloat, Doesn't one? Snowfalling metaphors. Unbidden tears, the off-size of small apples. Unshed. And unshedable. Such heaviness. The world has come and lies between us. Such distance. Ungraspable. Ash and its disappearance— Unbearable absence of being, Tonto, then taken back.

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky. Moon-fingers lay down their same routine On 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.

Dove-twirl in the tall grass. End-of-summer glaze next door On the gloves and split ends of the conked magnolia tree. Work sounds: truck back-up beep, wood tin-hammer, cicada, fire horn. History handles our past like spoiled fruit. Mid-morning, late-century light calicoed under the peach trees. Fingers us here. Fingers us here and here. The poem is a code with no message: The point of the mask is not the mask but the face underneath, Absolute, incommunicado, unhoused and peregrine. The gill net of history will pluck us soon enough From the cold waters of self-contentment we drift in One by one into its suffocating light and air. Structure becomes an element of belief, syntax And grammar a catechist, Their words what the beads say, words thumbed to our discontent.