A Poet Reflects

I used to think the power of words was inexhaustible,
That how we said the world
                                         was how it was, and how it would be.
I used to imagine the word-sway and word-thunder
Would silence the Silence and all that,
That words were the Word,
That language could lead us inexplicably to grace,
As though it were geographical.
I used to think these things when I was young.
                                                                    I still do.

—Charles Wright, from “Body and Soul” in A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)

And the heart,
That legless bird, circling and circling, hoping for anywhere to land.

A moment that should have lasted forever and forever
Long over—
                 it came and went before I knew it existed.
I think I know what it means,
But every time I start to explain it, I forget the words.

—Charles Wright, from “‘54 Chevy” in A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)

These are the four lessons I have learned …
Walk as though you’d been given one brown eye and one blue,
Think as though you thought best with somebody else’s brain,
Write as though you had in hand the last pencil on earth,
Pray as though you were praying with someone else’s soul.

—Charles Wright, from “Body and Soul” in A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)

Long journey, short road, the saying goes,
Meaning our lives,
                           meaning the afterlife of our nights and days
During our sleepwalk through them.

—Charles Wright, from “Via Negativa” in A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)

Some poems exist still on the other side of our lives,
And shine out, 
                      but we’ll never see them.
They are unutterable, in a language without an alphabet.
Unseen.  World-long.  Bone music.
Too bad.  We’d know them by heart
                                                     if we could summer them out in our wounds.
Too bad, Listening hard.
Clouds, of course, are everywhere, and the blue sky in between.
Blue sky.  Then what comes after the blue.

—Charles Wright, from “Body and Soul” in A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)

Each word, as someone once wrote, contains the universe.
The visible carries all the invisible on its back.
Tonight, in the unconditional, what moves in the long-limbed grasses,
                                                                                      what touches me
As though I didn’t exist?
What is it that keeps on moving,
                                                a tiny pillar of smoke
Erect on its hind legs,
                                loose in the hollow grasses?
A word I don’t know yet, a little word, containing infinity,
Noiseless and unrepentant, in sift through the dry grass.

—Charles Wright, from “A Short History of the Shadow” in A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)

I think of the nightfall all the time.
I think of the dark pine trees
                                             leaning out of the sky
Backlit by diminishing twilight, then not backlit.
I think of the way the tree frogs pitch
And pull in their summer dance.
I think of how the wind comes in from thousands of miles away.
I think of how the darkness abides.

—Charles Wright, opening strophe to “Night Music” from A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)

Dark birds, we peck at the crumbs of light
Incessantly
                 scattered across the stones and hard yard.
An incandescence covers us like a sky, that will
Not comfort us, a brightness
Beyond belief, peck peck,
                                       peck peck peck.

—Charles Wright, from “Hard Dreams” in A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2002)

The longed-for is tiny, and tenuous as a syllable.
In this it resembles us.
In this it resembles what we’ve passed on and shucked off.
Interminable as black water,
Irreparable as dirt,
It shadows our going forth and finds us,
                                                               and then finds us out.

—Charles Wright, from “On Heaven Considered as What Will Cover Us and Stony Comforter” in A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002)