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by Charles Wright


  Is one thing.

  What does it mean to you,

  Amber menagerie swept from his sun-struck and amber hands?

  Giorgio Vasari told it first,

  and told us this one as well:

  A wine grower from Belvedere

  Found an uncommon lizard and gave it to Leonardo

  Who made wings for it out of the skins

  Of other lizards,

  and filled the wings with mercury

  Which caused them to wave and quiver

  Whenever the lizard moved.

  He made eyes, a beard and two homs

  In the same way, tamed it, and kept it in a large box

  To terrify his friends.

  His games were the pure games of children,

  Asking for nothing but artifice, beauty and fear.

  —20 October 1984

  —Function is form, form function back here where the fruit trees

  Strip to November’s music,

  And the black cat and the tortoiseshell cat

  crouch and slink,

  Crouch and slink toward something I can’t see

  But hear the occasional fateful rustlings of,

  Where the last tomatoes seep

  from their red skins through the red dirt,

  And sweet woodruff holds up its smooth gray sticks

  Like a room full of boys

  all wanting to be excused at the same time:

  The song of white lights and power boats,

  the sails of August and late July devolve

  To simple description in the end,

  Something about a dark suture

  Across the lawn,

  something about the way the day snips

  It open and closes it

  When what-comes-out has come out

  and burns hard in its vacancy,

  Emerging elsewhere restructured and restrung,

  Like a tall cloud that all the rain has fallen out of.

  The last warm wind of summer

  shines in the dogwood trees

  Across the street, flamingoing berries and cupped leaves

  That wait to be cracked like lice

  Between winter’s fingernails.

  The season rusts to these odd stains

  And melodramatic stutterings

  In the bare spots of the yard, in the gutter angles

  Brimming with crisp leftovers,

  and gulled blooms in the rhododendrons,

  Veneer, like a hard wax, of nothing on everything.

  —3 November 1984

  Night Journal

  —I think of Issa, a man of few words:

  The world of dew

  Is the world of dew.

  And yet …

  And yet …

  —Three words contain

  all that we know for sure of the next life

  Or the last one: Close your eyes.

  Everything else is gossip,

  false mirrors, trick windows

  Flashing like Dutch glass

  In the undiminishable sun.

  —I write it down in visible ink,

  Black words that disappear when held up to the light—

  I write it down

  not to remember but to forget,

  Words like thousands of pieces of shot film

  exposed to the sun.

  I never see anything but the ground.

  —Everyone wants to tell his story.

  The Chinese say we live in the world of the 10,000 things,

  Each of the 10,000 things

  crying out to us

  Precisely nothing,

  A silence whose tune we’ve come to understand,

  Words like birthmarks,

  embolic sunsets drying behind the tongue.

  If we were as eloquent,

  If what we say could spread the good news the way that dogwood

  does,

  Its votive candles

  phosphorous and articulate in the green haze

  Of spring, surely something would hear us.

  —Even a chip of beauty

  is beauty intractable in the mind,

  Words the color of wind

  Moving across the fields there

  wind-addled and wind-sprung,

  Abstracted as water glints,

  The fields lion-colored and rope-colored,

  As in a picture of Paradise,

  the bodies languishing over the sky

  Trailing their dark identities

  That drift off and sieve away to the nothingness

  Behind them

  moving across the fields there

  As words move, slowly, trailing their dark identities.

  —Our words, like blown kisses, are swallowed by ghosts

  Along the way,

  their destinations bereft

  In a rub of brightness unending:

  How distant everything always is,

  and yet how close,

  Music starting to rise like smoke from under the trees.

  —Birds sing an atonal row

  unsyncopated

  From tree to tree,

  dew chants

  Whose songs have no words

  from tree to tree

  When night puts her dark lens in,

  One on this limb, two others back there.

  —Words, like all things, are caught in their finitude.

  They start here, they finish here

  No matter how high they rise—

  my judgment is that I know this

  And never love anything hard enough

  That would stamp me

  and sink me suddenly into bliss.

  A Journal of the Year of the Ox

  —January,

  the dragon maple sunk in its bones,

  The sky gray gouache and impediment.

  Pity the poor pilgrim, the setter-forth,

  Under a sweep so sure,

  pity his going up and his going down.

  Each year I remember less.

  This past year it’s been

  the Long Island of the Holston

  And all its keening wires

  in a west wind that seemed to blow constantly,

  Lisping the sins of the Cherokee.

  How shall we hold on, when everything bright falls away?

  How shall we know what calls us

  when what’s past remains what’s past

  And unredeemed, the crystal

  And wavering coefficient of what’s ahead?

  Thursday, purgatorial Thursday,

  The Blue Ridge etched in smoke

  through the leaded panes of the oak trees,

  There, then not there,

  A lone squirrel running the power line,

  neck bowed like a tiny buffalo:

  The Long Island of the Holston,

  sacred refuge ground

  Of the Cherokee Nation:

  nothing was ever killed there.

  I used to cross it twice whenever I drove to the golf course.

  Nobody tells you anything.

  The ghost of Dragging Canoe

  settles like snowflakes on the limbs

  Of the river bushes, a cold, white skin

  That bleeds when it breaks.

  Everyone wants to touch its hem

  Now that it’s fallen, everyone wants to see its face.

  What sifts us down through a blade-change

  stays hidden from us,

  But sifts us the same,

  Scores us and alters us utterly:

  From somewhere inside and somewhere outside, it smooths us

  down.

  Here’s your Spook, Indaco said,

  sliding the imitation Sandeman’s sherry figurine

  Toward me along the bar, memento

  And laughingstock of the 163rd,

  stamped out by the thousands

  At Nove, two hours up the road.

  It’s usually a ceremony, all your colleagues

 
And fellow officers standing absurdly about

  Happy you’re leaving, and you too,

  everyone half drunk

  And hilarious in his cordovan shoes.

  But not this time, Indaco wadding the paper sack up,

  He and someone whose name I can’t call back

  letting me go for good, and glad of it:

  I’d lost one document, I wore my hair long, I burned it by accident

  And no one ever forgot.

  Such small failures, such sleeveless oblivions

  We passed through

  trying to get our lives to fit right

  In what was available from day to day,

  And art,

  and then the obvious end of art, that grace

  Beyond its reach

  I’d see each night as I thumbed the Berensons

  And argued with Hobart and Schneeman

  that what’s outside

  The picture is more important than what’s in.

  They didn’t agree any more than Indaco had,

  All of us hungering after righteousness

  Like Paul Cézanne, we thought, in his constancy.

  Or Aeneas with the golden bough

  sweeping through Hell.

  O we were luminous in our ignorance O we were true.

  Form comes from form, it’s said:

  nothing is ever ended,

  A spilling like shook glass in the air,

  Water over water,

  flame out of flame,

  Whatever we can’t see, whatever we can’t touch,

  unfixed and shining …

  And today I remember nothing.

  The sky is a wrung-out, China blue

  and hides no meanings.

  The trees have a pewter tinge and hide no meanings.

  All of it hustles over me like a wind

  and reminds me of nothing.

  Nobody rises out of the ground in a gold mist.

  Nobody slides like an acrobat

  out of the endless atmosphere.

  Nobody touches my face

  Or hand.

  Not a word is said that reminds me of anything

  And O it is cold now by the fake Etruscan urn

  And six miniature box bushes

  nobody stands beside

  In the real wind tightening its scarf

  Around the white throats

  of everyone who is not here.

  The cold, almost solid, lies

  Like snow outside

  in the tufted spikes of the seed grass

  And footprints we didn’t leave

  That cross the driveway and disappear up the front steps.

  It’s not the darkness we die of, as someone said,

  seamless and shut tight

  As water we warm up and rock in,

  But cold, the cold with its quartz teeth

  And fingernails

  that wears us away, wears us away

  Into an afterthought.

  Or a glint

  Down there by the dwarf spruce and the squirrel run.

  Or one of the absences who lips at the edge of understanding

  Wherever I turn,

  as pursed and glittering as a kiss.

  —20 January 1985

  —The sunset, Mannerist clouds

  just shy of the Blue Ridge

  Gainsay the age before they lose their blush

  In the rising coagulation of five o’clock.

  Two dark, unidentifiable birds

  swoop and climb

  Out of the picture, the white-slatted, red-roofed Munch house

  Gathering light as the evening begins to clot.

  The trees dissolve in their plenitude

  into a dark forest

  And streetlights come on to stare like praying mantises down on us.

  Next morning all’s inside out,

  the winter trees with their nervous systems

  Snatched up and sparkless against the sky.

  Light lies without desire on the black wires

  And the white wires,

  the dead leaves sing like gnats,

  Rising and settling back when the wind comes.

  How does one deal with what is always falling away,

  Returning diminished with each turn?

  The grass knows, stunned in its lockjaw bed,

  but it won’t tell.

  —30 January 1985

  —We stand at the green gates,

  substitutes for the unseen

  Rising like water inside our bodies,

  Stand-ins against the invisible:

  It’s the blank sky of the page

  —not the words it’s never the words—

  That backgrounds our lives:

  It’s you always you and not your new suit

  That elicits solicitude:

  The unknown repeats us, and quickens our in-between.

  Winter is like that—abstract,

  flat planes and slashes,

  The Blue Ridge like a worm’s back

  Straight ahead,

  one skewed hump and then a smooth one,

  Hallelujah of tree branches and telephone poles

  In front, and a house or two and a nurse:

  February music,

  high notes and a thin line strung

  For us to cleave to, black notes

  Someone is humming we haven’t been introduced to:

  Like the stone inside a rock,

  the stillness of form is the center of everything,

  Inalterable, always at ease.

  —7 February 1985

  —The rain, in its white disguise,

  has nothing to say to the wind

  That carries it, whose shoulders

  It slips from giving no signal, aimlessly, one drop

  At a time, no word

  Or gesture to what has carried it all this way for nothing.

  This is the disappearance we all dreamed of when young,

  Without apology, tougher than water, no word

  To anyone,

  disguised as ourselves

  And unrecognizable, unique

  And indistinguishable from what we disappeared into.

  —13 February 1985

  —One, one and by one we all slip into the landscape,

  Under the muddy patches,

  locked in the frozen bud

  Of the down-leafed rhododendron,

  Or blurred in the echoing white of a rabbit’s tail

  Chalked on the winter’s dark

  in the back yard or the driveway.

  One, one and by one we all sift to a difference

  And cry out if one of our branches snaps

  or our bark is cut.

  The winter sunlight scours us,

  The winter wind is our comfort and consolation.

  We settle into our ruin

  One, one and by one as we slip from clear rags into feathery skin

  Or juice-in-the-ground, pooled

  And biding its time

  backwashed under the slick peach tree.

  One, one and by one thrust up by the creek bank,

  Huddled in spongy colonies,

  longing to be listened to.

  Here I am, here I am, we all say,

  I’m back,

  Rustle and wave, chatter and spring

  Up to the air, the sweet air.

  Hardened around the woodpecker’s hole, under his down,

  We all slip into the landscape, one, one and by one.

  —25 February 1985

  —Fever and ooze, fever and ooze:

  Pronoun by pronoun, verb by irregular verb,

  Winter grows great with spring: March:

  already something has let loose

  Deep in the hidden undersprings

  Of the year, looking for some way out: moss sings

  At the threshold, tongues wag

  down the secret valleys and dark draws

  Under the sun-stunned grass:
>
  What can’t stop comes on, mewling like blood-rush in the ear,

  Balancing over the sunken world:

  fever and ooze, fever and ooze.

  —9 March 1985

  —I used to sit on one of the benches along the Adige

  In a small park up-river from S. Anastasia

  from time to time

  When I lived in Verona,

  the Roman theater like lapped wings

  On some seabird across the water

  Unable to rise, half folded, half turned in the pocked air

  The river spray threw up

  on me and on it.

  Catullus’s seat—VALERI—was carved on top of the left-hand wing.

  I used to try to imagine—delicious impossibility—

  What it must have been like to be him,

  his vowels and consonants

  The color of bee wings hived in the bee-colored afternoons.

  An iron-spiked and barbed-wire jut-out and overhang loomed

  just to my left.

  I always sat as close to it as I could.

  I remember a woman I saw there once,

  in March,

  The daylight starting to shake its hair out like torch flames

  Across the river,

  the season poised like a veiled bride,

  White foot in its golden shoe

  Beating the ground, full of desire, white foot at the white

  threshold.

  She stared at the conched hillside

  as though the season became her,

  As though a threshold were opening

  Somewhere inside her, no woman more beautiful than she was,

  No song more insistent than the beat of that white foot,

  As she stepped over,

  full of desire,

  Her golden shoe like a sun in the day’s deep chamber.

 

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