Charles Wright Quotes

Let go, live your life,
the grave has no sunny corners

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

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

At dawn, in the great meadow, a solitude
As easy as white paint comes down from the mountains
To daydream, bending the grass.

I take my body, familiar bundle of sorrows, to be
Touched by its hem, and smoothed over . . .

There's only one secret in life that's worth knowing,
And you found it.

I'll find it too.

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

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.

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

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.

Memory is a cemetery
I’ve visited once or twice

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

Friday beneath the sky, its little postcards of melancholy
Outside each window,
the engines inside the roses at half speed,
The huge page of the sea with its one word despair,
Fuchsia blossoms littered across the deck,
Unblotted tide pools of darkness beneath the ferns …
And still I go on looking,
match after match in the black air.

"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.

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.

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.