Charles Wright Quotes

It’s good to know certain things:
What’s departed, in order to know what’s left to come;
That water’s immeasurable and incomprehensible
And blows in the air
Where all that’s fallen and silent becomes invisible;
That fire’s the light our names are carved in.

That shame is a garment of sorrow;
That time is the Adversary, and stays sleepless and wants for nothing;
That clouds are unequal and words are.

Arrange your unutterable alphabet, my man, / and hold tight. / It's all you've got, a naming of things, and not so beautiful.

It may not be written in any book, but it is written — You can’t go back,
you can’t repeat the unrepeatable.

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 that 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.

All those nights looking up at the sky, wanting to be there, away from the grief of being here.

"Spider Crystal Ascension"

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 when it does, we lie back in our watery hair and rock.

I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.

How many years have slipped through our hands? At least as many as the constellations we still can identify. The quarter moon, like a light skiff, floats out of the mist-remnants Of last night’s hard rain. It, too, will slip through our fingers with no ripple, without us in it.

There is an otherness inside us
We never touch,
no matter how far down our hands reach.
It is the past,
with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere ...
Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it
Year after year,
But who can ever remember enough?

Meanwhile, the mole goes on with its subterranean daydreams,
The dogs lie around like rugs

"Ars Poetica II"

I find, after all these years, I am a believer — I believe what the thunder and lightning have to say;
I believe that dreams are real,
and that death has two reprisals;
I believe that dead leaves and black water fill my heart.

I shall die like a cloud, beautiful, white, full of nothingness.

The night sky is an ideogram,
a code card punched with holes.
It thinks it’s the word of what’s-to-come.
It thinks this, but it’s only The Library of Last Resort,
The reflected light of The Great Misunderstanding.

God is the fire my feet are held to.

Out of any two thoughts I have, one is devoted to death.
Our days an uncertainty, a chaos and shapeless,
all that our lives are
blurs down, like a landscape reflected in water.

Lo que queda es con lo que empiezas.

The ache for anything is a thick dust in the heart.

The plains drift on through the deep daylight. I watch the snow bees sent mad by the sun. The limbs of the hickory trees swing loose in the noontide, Feathery, stretching their necks. The wind blows through its own hair forever. If something is due me still — Firedogs, ashes, the soap of another life — I give it back. And this hive Of shelved combs, my wax in its little box.