Zone Journals

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Zone Journals Page 7

by Charles Wright


  Through S. Zeno’s doors,

  trying to take the next step and break clear …

  A Journal of One Significant Landscape

  April again. Aries comes forth

  and we are released

  Into the filter veins and vast line

  Under the elm and apple wood.

  The last of the daffodils

  Sulphurs the half-jade grass

  against the arbor vitae.

  Better the bodying forth,

  better the coming back.

  I listen to what the quince hums,

  Its music filling my ear

  with its flushed certitude.

  Wild onion narrows the latitudes.

  I pale and I acquiesce.

  Gravity empties me

  Stem by stem through its deep regalia,

  Resplendent and faintly anodyne,

  The green of my unbecoming

  urging me earthward.

  I long to escape through the white light in the rose root,

  At ease in its clean, clear joy:

  Unlike the spring flowers, I don’t unfold, one petal

  after another, in solitude—

  Happiness happens, like sainthood, in spite of ourselves.

  The day dies like a small child,

  blushed and without complaint,

  Its bedcovers sliding quietly to the floor.

  How still the world’s room holds,

  everything stemming its breath

  In exhilaration and sadness.

  Halfway through May and I am absolved,

  A litter of leaves like half notes

  held tight in the singing trees.

  Against the board fence, the candle tips of the white pines

  Gutter and burn, gutter and burn

  on the blue apse of the sky.

  How do we get said what must be said,

  Seep of the honeysuckle like bad water, yellow

  And slick, through the privet hedge,

  tiger iris opening like an eye

  Watching us steadily now, aware that what we see

  In its disappearance and inexactitude

  Is not what we think we see.

  How does one say these things?

  The sheathed beaks of the waxed magnolia

  Utter their couched syllables,

  Shhh of noon wind mouthing the last word.

  Deep in the crevices and silk ravines of the snow rose,

  Under the purple beards at the lily’s throat,

  silence stocks its cocoon:

  Inside, in its radiance,

  the right answer waits to be born.

  Truthful words are not beautiful,

  beautiful words not truthful,

  Lao-tzu says. He has a point.

  Nor are good words persuasive:

  The way of heaven can do no real harm,

  and it doesn’t contend.

  Beginning of June, clouds like medieval banderoles

  Out of the sky’s mouth

  back toward the east,

  Explaining the painting as Cimabue once did

  In Pisa, in tempera,

  angels sending the message out

  In those days. Not now, down here

  Where the peaches swell like thumbs, and the little apples and

  pears

  Buzz like unbroken codes on the sun’s wire,

  their secret shoptalk

  The outtakes we would be privy to,

  But never are, no matter how hard we look at them or listen.

  Still, it’s here in its gilt script,

  or there, speaking in tongues.

  One of the nondescript brown-headed black birds that yawp

  And scramble in and out of the trees

  latches me with his lean eye

  And tells me I’m wasting my time,

  something I’m getting used to

  In my one life with its one regret

  I keep on trundling here

  in order to alter it.

  You’re wasting your time, he tells me again. And I am.

  It is not possible to read the then in the now.

  It is not possible to see the blood in the needle’s eye,

  Sky like a sheet of carbon paper

  repeating our poor ills

  On the other side.

  We must be good to each other.

  Like a developing photograph,

  the dawn hillsides appear

  Black-and-white then green then rack-over into color

  Down-country along the line,

  House and barn as the night blanks

  away into morning’s fixer …

  Like dreams awaiting their dreamers, cloud-figures step forth

  Then disappear in the sky, ridge lines are cut,

  grass moans

  Under the sun’s touch and drag:

  With a sigh the day explains itself, and reliefs into place …

  Like light bulbs, the pears turn on,

  birds plink, the cow skull spins and stares

  In heaven’s eye, sunshine

  Cheesecloths the ground beside the peach trees.

  The dragon maple shivers its dry sides …

  I put down these memorandums of my affections,

  As John Clare said,

  memory through a secondary

  Being the soul of time

  and life the principal but its shadow,

  July in its second skin glistering through the trees …

  For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,

  Ruysbroeck has told us,

  and that is why

  He’s ever saying to our innermost spirit one deep

  Unfathomable word,

  and nothing else …

  Thus stone upon stone,

  And circle on circle I raised eternally:

  So step after step

  I drew back in sure ascension to Paradise,

  Someone once wrote about Brunelleschi—

  Giovanbattista Strozzi,

  Vasari says—when he died

  Vaulting the double dome of S. Maria del Fiore

  In Florence,

  which everyone said was impossible.

  Paolo Uccello, on the other hand, once drew

  The four elements as animals:

  a mole for earth,

  A fish for water, a salamander for fire, and for air

  A chameleon which lives on air

  and thus will assume whatever color.

  In his last days, secluded inside his house, he stayed up

  All night in his study, his wife said,

  intent on perspective.

  O what a lovely thing perspective is, he’d call out.

  August thrusts down its flushed face,

  disvectored at the horizon.

  How is the vanishing point

  when you look at it hard?

  How does it lie in the diamond zones?

  What are the colors of disappearance,

  pink and gray,

  Diamond and pink and gray?

  How are they hard to look at?

  September’s the month that moves us

  out of our instinct:

  As the master said:

  for knowledge, add something everyday,

  To be wise, subtract …

  This is the season of subtraction,

  When what goes away is what stays,

  pooled in its own grace,

  When loss isn’t loss, and fall

  Hangs on the cusp of its one responsibility,

  Tiny erasures,

  palimpsest over the pear trees.

  Somewhere inside the landscape

  Something reverses.

  Leaf lines recoil, the moon switches

  Her tides, dry banks begin to appear

  In the long conduits

  under the skin and in the heart.

  I listen to dark October just over the hill,

  I listen to what the weeds exhale,

/>   and the pines echo,

  Elect in their rectitude:

  The idea of emptiness is everything to them.

  I smooth myself, I abide.

  Chinese Journal

  In 1935, the year I was born,

  Giorgio Morandi

  Penciled these bottles in by leaving them out, letting

  The presence of what surrounds them increase the presence

  Of what is missing,

  keeping its distance and measure.

  The purple-and-white spike plants

  stand upright and spine-laced,

  As though poised to fight by keeping still.

  Inside their bristly circle,

  The dwarf boxwood

  flashes its tiny shields at the sun.

  Under the skylight, the Pothos plant

  Dangles its fourteen arms

  into the absence of its desire.

  Like a medusa in the two-ply, celadon air,

  Its longing is what it grows on,

  heart-leaves in the nothingness.

  To shine but not to dazzle.

  Falling leaves, falling water,

  everything comes to rest.

  What can anyone know of the sure machine that makes all things

  work?

  To find one word and use it correctly,

  providing it is the right word,

  Is more than enough:

  An inch of music is an inch and a half of dust.

  Night Journal

  The breath of What’s-Out-There sags

  Like bad weather below the branches,

  fog-sided, Venetian,

  Trailing its phonemes along the ground.

  It says what it has to say

  Carefully, without sound, word

  After word imploding into articulation

  And wherewithal for the unbecome.

  I catch its drift.

  And if I could answer back,

  If once I had a cloudier tongue,

  what would I say?

  I’d say what it says: nothing, with all its verities

  Gone to the ground and hiding:

  I’d say what it says now,

  Dangling its language like laundry between the dark limbs,

  Just hushed in its cleanliness.

  The absolute night backs off.

  Hard breezes freeze in my eyelids.

  The moon, stamped horn of fool’s gold,

  Answers for me in the arteries of the oak trees.

  I long for clear water, the silence

  Of risk and deep splendor,

  the quietness inside the solitude.

  I want its drop on my lip, its cold undertaking.

  Notes

  Night Journal

  Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard (Harper & Row, 1982).

  A Journal of the Year of the Ox

  Catullus Tibullus and Pervigilium Veneris (Harvard University Press MCMLXXVI); The Penguin Book of Italian Verse (Penguin Books, 1960); Historical Sketches of the Holston Valleys by Thomas W. Preston (The Kingsport Press, 1926); “By the Banks of the Holston” by Jeff Daniel Marion, The Iron Mountain Review, Vol. 1, #2 (Winter 1984); Il Palazzo di Schifanoia by Ranieri Varese, Grafici Editoriale s.r.i. (Bologna, 1983); The Cloud of Unknowing: An English Mystic of the 14th Century (Bums Oates).

  Light Journal

  Salvatore Quasimodo, “Ed è súbito sera.”

  A Journal of One Significant Landscape

  Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari, translated by George Bull (Penguin Books, 1965).

  Night Journal II

  For Stanley Kunitz.

  Copyright © 1988 by Charles Wright

  All rights reserved

  Published simultaneously in Canada by

  Collins Publishers, Toronto

  eISBN 9781429933568

  First eBook Edition : May 2011

  First printing, 1988

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wright, Charles.

  Zone journals.

  “The first five poems appeared in … limited

  edition volume entitled 5 journals”—

  I. Wright, Charles. 5 journals.

  II. Title.

  PS3573.R52Z39 1988 811′.54 87-21207

  Acknowledgments are made to Field, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Open Places, The Gettysburg Review, and A Celebration for Stanley Kunitz, where some of these poems originally appeared. “Yard Journal” and sections of “A Journal of the Year of the Ox” originally appeared in The New Yorker; other sections of “A Journal of the Year of the Ox” were first published in Ploughshares. The first five poems appeared in a fine press, limited edition volume entitled 5 Journals, printed and published by Red Ozier Press, New York City, 1986.

 

 

 


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