No sound but the sound of no sound,late sunlight falling on grass.” — Charles Wright, from “20,” Littlefoot: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007)

Nothing’s so beautiful as the memory of itGathering light as glass does,As glass does when the sundown is on it                                                   and darkness is still a thousand miles away. —Charles Wright, from “A Journal of the Year of the Ox,” Zone Journals (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1988)

Anything that we think we’ve learned, / we’ve learned in the dark. — Charles Wright, from “Mid-Winter Snowfall in the Piazza Dante,” Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition April 9, 2001)

What we are given in dreams we write as blue paint,Or messages to the clouds.At evening we wait for the rain to fall and the sky to clear.Our words are words for the clay, uttered in undertones,Our gestures salve for the wind. We sit out on the earth and stretch our limbs,Hoarding the little mounds… Continue reading Charles Wright

Let go, live your life,the grave has no sunny corners – – Charles Wright, from “High Country Canticle,” Scar Tissue: Poems. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition July 25, 2006)

And what does this matter?                                               Not much, unless you’re one of those,As I am, who hears a music in such things, who thinks,When the sun goes down, or the stars do,That the tune they’re doing is his song,That the instruments of the given world                                                                  play only for him. — Charles Wright, from “Wrong Notes,” Scar… Continue reading Charles Wright

Time, like a swallow’s shadow cutting across the grass,Faint, darker, then faint again,Imprints our ecstasy, and scores us.And time will finish this, not I, and write it out,       as only time can. — Charles Wright, from “Summer Mornings,” A Short History of the Shadow (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002)

Our lives are an emptiness                 at rest in the present.Dark cloud, bright cloud, sunlight, rain. — Charles Wright, from “Black and Blue,” Chickamauga: Poems (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995)