James Wright

Anghiari is medieval, a sleeve sloping down A steep hill, suddenly sweeping out To the edge of a cliff, and dwindling. But far up the mountain, behind the town, We too were swept out, out by the wind, Alone with the Tuscan grass. Wind had been blowing across the hills For days, and everything now was graying gold With dust, everything we saw, even Some small children scampering along a road, Twittering Italian to a small caged bird. We sat beside them to rest in some brushwood, And I leaned down to rinse the dust from my face. I found the spider web there, whose hinges Reeled heavily and crazily with the dust, Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging And scattering shadows among shells and wings. And then she stepped into the center of air Slender and fastidious, the golden hair Of daylight along her shoulders, she poised there, While ruins crumbled on every side of her. Free of the dust, as though a moment before She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself. I gazed, close to her, till at last she stepped Away in her own good time. Many men Have searched all over Tuscany and never found What I found there, the heart of the light Itself shelled and leaved, balancing On filaments themselves falling. The secret Of this journey is to let the wind Blow its dust all over your body, To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly All the way through your ruins, and not to lose Any sleep over the dead, who surely Will bury their own, don’t worry.

I will grieve alone, As I strolled alone, years ago, down along The Ohio shore. I hid in the hobo jungle weeds Upstream from the sewer main, Pondering, gazing. I saw, down river, At Twenty-third and Water Streets By the vinegar works, The doors open in early evening. Swinging their purses, the women Poured down the long street to the river And into the river. I do not know how it was They could drown every evening. What time near dawn did they climb up the other shore, Drying their wings? For the river at Wheeling, West Virginia, Has only two shores: The one in hell, the other In Bridgeport, Ohio. And nobody would commit suicide, only To find beyond death Bridgeport, Ohio.

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field. The dark wheat listens. Be still. Now. There they are, the moon's young, trying Their wings. Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone Wholly, into the air. I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe Or move. I listen. The wheat leans back toward its own darkness, And I lean toward mine.

In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home, Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love. Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

for J. L. D. Why should we do this? What good is it to us? Above all, how can we do such a thing? How can it possibly be done? —Freud 1 My name is James A. Wright, and I was born Twenty-five miles from this infected grave, In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father. He tried to teach me kindness. I return Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried, To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried, Had I not run away before my time. Ohio caught George Doty. Clean as lime, His skull rots empty here. Dying’s the best Of all the arts men learn in a dead place. I walked here once. I made my loud display, Leaning for language on a dead man’s voice. Now sick of lies, I turn to face the past. I add my easy grievance to the rest: 2 Doty, if I confess I do not love you, Will you let me alone? I burn for my own lies. The nights electrocute my fugitive, My mind. I run like the bewildered mad At St. Clair Sanitarium, who lurk, Arch and cunning, under the maple trees, Pleased to be playing guilty after dark. Staring to bed, they croon self-lullabies. Doty, you make me sick. I am not dead. I croon my tears at fifty cents per line. 3 Idiot, he demanded love from girls, And murdered one. Also, he was a thief. He left two women, and a ghost with child. The hair, foul as a dog’s upon his head, Made such revolting Ohio animals Fitter for vomit than a kind man’s grief. I waste no pity on the dead that stink, And no love’s lost between me and the crying Drunks of Belaire, Ohio, where police Kick at their kidneys till they die of drink. Christ may restore them whole, for all of me. Alive and dead, those giggling muckers who Saddled my nightmares thirty years ago Can do without my widely printed sighing Over their pains with paid sincerity. I do not pity the dead, I pity the dying. 4 I pity myself, because a man is dead. If Belmont County killed him, what of me? His victims never loved him. Why should we? And yet, nobody had to kill him either. It does no good to woo the grass, to veil The quicklime hole of a man’s defeat and shame. Nature-lovers are gone. To hell with them. I kick the clods away, and speak my name. 5 This grave’s gash festers. Maybe it will heal, When all are caught with what they had to do In fear of love, when every man stands still By the last sea, And the princes of the sea come down To lay away their robes, to judge the earth And its dead, and we dead stand undefended everywhere, And my bodies—father and child and unskilled criminal— Ridiculously kneel to bare my scars, My sneaking crimes, to God’s unpitying stars. 6 Staring politely, they will not mark my face From any murderer’s, buried in this place. Why should they? We are nothing but a man. 7 Doty, the rapist and the murderer, Sleeps in a ditch of fire, and cannot hear; And where, in earth or hell’s unholy peace, Men’s suicides will stop, God knows, not I. Angels and pebbles mock me under trees. Earth is a door I cannot even face. Order be damned, I do not want to die, Even to keep Belaire, Ohio, safe. The hackles on my neck are fear, not grief. (Open, dungeon! Open, roof of the ground!) I hear the last sea in the Ohio grass, Heaving a tide of gray disastrousness. Wrinkles of winter ditch the rotted face Of Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief: Dirt of my flesh, defeated, underground.