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?

...may we not be strangers in the lush province of joy

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.

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.

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)

"Sitting at Night on the Front Porch"

I’m here, on the dark porch, restyled in my mother’s chair.
10:45 and no moon.
Below the house, car lights
Swing down, on the canyon floor, to the sea.

In this they resemble us,
Dropping like match flames through the great void
Under our feet.
In this they resemble her, burning and disappearing.

Everyone’s gone
And I’m here, sizing the dark, saving my mother’s seat.

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

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.

Memory is a cemetery
I’ve visited once or twice

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.

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

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.

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

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.

"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.