Charles Wright Quotes

Out of any two thoughts I have, one is devoted to death.

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.

The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.

Memory is a cemetery
I’ve visited once or twice

Snub end of a dismal year,
deep in the dwarf orchard,
The sky with its undercoat of blackwash and point stars,
I stand in the dark and answer to
My life, this shirt I want to take off,
which is on fire . . .

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

We disappear as stars do, soundless, without a trace.

We've all led raucous lives,
some of them inside, some of them out.
But only the poem you leave behind is what's important.
Everyone knows this.
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride.
Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read.
Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times
His own weight a day just to stay alive.
Now that's a life on the edge.

THINGS HAVE ENDS AND BEGINNINGS” Cloud mountains rise over mountain range. Silence and quietness, sky bright as water, sky bright as lake water. Grace is the instinct for knowing when to stop. And where.

Language is the element of definition, the defining and descriptive incantation. It puts the coin between our teeth. It whistles the boat up. It shows us the city of light across the water. Without language there is no poetry, without poetry there’s just talk. Talk is cheap and proves nothing. Poetry is dear and difficult to come by. But it poles us across the river and puts a music in our ears. It moves us to contemplation. And what we contemplate, what we sing our hymns to and offer our prayers to, is what will reincarnate us in the natural world, and what will be our one hope for salvation in the What’sToCome.

Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world.
Morning arrives and that's it.
Sunlight darkens the earth.

He looked like an angelic little boy who had been kicked out of his orphanage for failing to take part in group masturbation.

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.

"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 write your name for the last time in this mist,
White breath on the windowpane,
And watch it vanish. No, it stays there.