Charles Wright Quotes

We filigree and we baste.
But what do the dead care for the fringe of words,
Safe in their suits of milk?
What do they care for the honk and flash of a new style?

And who is to say if the inch of snow in our hearts
Is rectitude enough?

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

Like a vein of hard coal, it was the strike
We fantasized, the pocket of sure reward we sidestepped the road-
blocks for
In Southwest Virginia, seamed in its hillside
Above the north fork of the Holston River.

One afternoon before Christmas
In 1953, we crossed the bridge from Tennessee on a whiskey run,
Churchill and Bevo Hammond and Philbeck and I,
All home for the holidays.
On the back road where they chased us, we left the Sheriff's Patrol in
their own dust,
And washed ours down with Schlitz on the way home.

Jesus, it’s so ridiculous, and full of self-love,
The way we remember ourselves,
and the dust we leave...

Remember me as you will, but remember me once
Slide-wheeling around the curves,
letting it out on the other side of the line.

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.

Toadstools

The toadstools are starting to come
up,
circular and dry.
Nothing will touch them,
Gophers or chipmunks, wasps or swallows.
They glow in the twilight like rooted will-o’-the-wisps.
Nothing will touch them.
As though little roundabouts from the bunched unburiable,
Powers, dominions,
As though orphans rode herd in the short grass,
as though they had heard the call,
They will always be with us,
transcenders of the world.
Someone will try to stick his beak into their otherworldly styrofoam.
Someone may try to taste a taste of forever.
For some it’s a refuge, for some a shady place to fall down.
Grief is a floating barge-boat,
who knows where it’s going to moor?

"Waterfalls"

Is it age, is it lack of adoration, is it
Regret there’s no ladder to the clouds?
Whatever, we inhabit the quotidian, as we must,
While somewhere behind our backs,
waterfalls tumble and keep on going
Into the deep desire of distance.

I’m starting to feel like an old man
alone in a small boat
In a snowfall of blossoms,
Only the south wind for company,
Drifting downriver, the beautiful costumes of spring
Approaching me down the runway
of all I’ve ever wished for.

Voices from long ago floating across the water.
How to account for
my single obsession about the past?
How to account for
these blossoms as white as an autumn frost?
Dust of the future baptizing our faithless foreheads.
Alone in a small boat, released in a snowfall of blossoms.

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

The life of this world is wind
Windblown we come, and windblown we go away.
All that we look on is windfall.
All we remember is wind.

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

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

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.

If you don’t shine you are darkness.

from “Tomorrow