There Is No Shelter
Each evening, the sins of the whole world collect here like a dew.
In the morning, little galaxies, they flash out
And flame,
their charred, invisible residue etching
The edges our lives take and the course of things, filling
The shadows in,
an aftertrace, through the discards of the broken world,
Like the long, slow burn of a struck match.
—Charles Wright, from Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2000); the poem first appeared in Chickamauga
