There is an otherness inside us We never touch, no matter how far down our hands reach. It is the past, with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere ...… - Charles Wright

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)

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,

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