Everything works against you The way the evening comes down Its trellises one rose at a time The watery knots of light That lap at your memory The way you thought of your life once An endless falling of seeds. — Charles Wright, from “One Two Three,” Hard Freight (Wesleyan University Press, 1973) Advertisements
Still, there’s another story, that what’s inside us is what’s outside us: That what we see outside ourselves we’ll soon see inside ourselves. It’s visible, and is our garment. Better, perhaps, to wear that. Better to live as though we already lived the afterlife, Unattached to our cape of starred flesh. — Charles Wright,… Continue reading Charles Wright
The spider, juiced crystal and Milky Way, drifts on his web through the night sky And looks down, waiting for us to ascend … At dawn he is still there, invisible, short of breath, mending his net. All morning we look for the white face to rise from the lake like a tiny star. And… Continue reading Charles Wright
Each second the earth is struck hard by four and a half pounds of sunlight. Each second. Try to imagine that. No wonder deep shade is what the soul longs for. And not, as we always thought, the light. — Charles Wright, from “In Praise of Thomas Hardy,” A Short History of the… Continue reading Charles Wright,
After the end of something, there comes another end, This one behind you, and far away. Only a lifetime can get you to it, and then just barely. — Charles Wright, from “28,” Littlefoot: A Poem (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007)
The ache for anything is a thick dust in the heart. — Charles Wright, from “Three Poems for the New Year,” The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 1, 1991)
The human body is not the world, and yet it is. The world contains it, and is itself contained. Just so. The distance between the two Is like the distance between the no and the yes, abysmal distance, Nothing and everything, Just so. — Charles Wright, from “Body Language,” Appalachia (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998)
