Charles Wright Quotes

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

Narrow road, wide road, all of us on it, unhappy,
Unsettled, seven yards short of immortality
And a yard short of not long to live.
Better to sit down in the tall grass
and watch the clouds,
To lift our faces up to the sky,
Considering — for most of us — our lives have been a constant mistake.

Lonesomeness. Morandi, Cezanne, it's all about lonesomeness.
And Rothko. Especially Rothko.

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 of sorrow laid up in our hearts. — Charles Wright, closing lines to “Homage to Paul Cézanne,” The Southern Cross: Poems (Random House, 1981)

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.

A cicada whines,
his voice
Starting to drown through the rainy world,
No ripple of wind,
no sound but his song of black wings,
No song but the song of his black wings.

Such emptiness at the heart,
such emptiness at the heart of being,

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.

"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.

A moment that should have lasted forever and forever
Long over — it came and went before I knew it existed.
I think I know what it means,
But every time I start to explain it, I forget the words.

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 . . .

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 times can summer turn to fall in one life?

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?

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

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.
Moon-fingers lay down their same routine
On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.
Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.

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.

And the wind says “What?” to me.
And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me.
And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.
And the gears notch and the engines wheel.