Drone and Ostinato
Winter. Cold like a carved thing outside the window glass.
Silence of sunlight and ice dazzle.
Stillness of noon.
Dragon back of the Blue Ridge,
Landscape laid open like an old newspaper, memory into memory.
Our lives are like birds’ lives, flying around, blown away.
We’re bandied and bucked on and carried across the sky,
Drowned in the blue of the infinite,
blur-white and drift.
We disappear as stars do, soundless, without a trace.
Nevertheless, let’s settle and hedge the bet.
The wind picks up, clouds cringe,
Snow locks in place on the lawn.
Wordless is what the soul wants, the one thing that I keep in mind.
One in one united, bare in bare doth shine.
REPLY TO WANG WEI
The dream of reclusive life, a strict, essential solitude,
Is a younger hermit's dream.
Tuesday, five days till winter, a cold, steady rain.
White hair, white heart. The time's upon us and no exit
East of the lotus leaves.
No exit, you said, and a cold, steady rain.Indeed.
All those walks by the river, all those goodbyes.
Willows shrink back to brown across Locust Avenue,
The mountains are frost and blue
and fellow travellers.
Give you peace, you said, freedom from ten thousand matters.
And asked again, does fame come only to the ancients?
At the foot of the southern mountains, white clouds pass without end,
You wrote one time in a verse.
They still do, and still without end.
That's it. Just wanted to let you know it hasn't changed—no out, no end,
And fame comes only to the ancients, and justly so,
Rain turning slowly to snow now then back into rain.
Everywhere everywhere, you wrote, something is falling,
The evening mist has no resting place.
What time we waste, wasting time.
Still, I sit still,
The mind swept clean in its secret shade,
Though no monk from any hill will ever come to call.
ALL LANDSCAPE IS ABSTRACT, AND TENDS TO REPEAT ITSELF
I came to my senses with a pencil in my hand
And a piece of paper in front of me.
To the years
Before the pencil, O, I was the resurrection.
Still, who knows where the soul goes,
Up or down,
after the light switch is turned off, who knows?
It's late August, and prophets are calling their bears in.
The sacred is frightening to the astral body,
As is its absence.
We have to choose which fear is our consolation.
Everything comes ex alto,
We'd like to believe, the origin and the end, or
Non-origin and the non-end,
each distant and inaccessible.
Over the Blue Ridge, the whisperer starts to whisper in tongues.
Remembered landscapes are left in me
The way a bee leaves its sting,
hopelessly, passion-placed,
Untranslatable language.
Non-mystical, insoluble in blood, they act as an opposite
To the absolute, whose words are a solitude, and set to music.
All forms of landscape are autobiographical.
CICADA BLUE
I wonder what Spanish poets would say about this,
Bloodless, mid-August meridian,
Afternoon like a sucked-out, transparent insect shell,
Diffused, and tough to the touch.
Something about a labial, probably,
something about the blue.
St. John of the Cross, say, or St. Teresa of Avila.
Or even St. Thomas Aquinas,
Who said, according to some,
”All I have written seems like straw Compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.”
Not Spanish, but close enough,
something about the blue.
Blue, I love you, blue, one of them said once in a different color,
The edged and endless
Expanse of nowhere and nothingness
hemmed as a handkerchief from here,
Cicada shell of hard light
Just under it, blue, I love you, blue. . . .
We’ve tried to press God in our hearts the way we’d press a leaf in a
book,
Afternoon memoried now,
seppia into brown,
Night coming on with its white snails and its ghost of the Spanish
poet,
Poet of shadows and death.
Let’s press him firm in our hearts, O blue, I love you, blue.
IN THE KINGDOM OF THE PAST,
THE BROWN-EYED MAN IS KING
It’s all so pitiful, really, the little photographs
Around the room of places I’ve been,
And me in them, the half-read books, the fetishes, this
Tiny arithmetic against the dark undazzle.
Who do we think we’re kidding
Certainly not our selves, those hardy perennials
We take such care of, and feed, who keep on keeping on
Each year, their knotty egos like bulbs
Safe in the damp and dreamy soil of their self-regard.
No way we bamboozle them with these
One comes in on one’s knees to,
The country of what was, the country of what we pretended to be,
Cruxes and intersections of all we’d thought was fixed.
There is no guilt like the love of guilt
STAR TURN
Nothing is quite as secretive as the way the stars
Take off their bandages and stare out
At the night,
that dark rehearsal hall,
And whisper their little songs,
The alpha and beta ones, the ones from the great fire.
Nothing is quite as gun shy,
the invalid, broken pieces
Drifting and rootless, rising and falling, forever
Deeper into the darkness.
Nightly they give us their dumb show, nightly they flash us
Their message and melody,
frost-sealed, our lidless companions.
---
http://www.ashevillepoetryreview.com/2002/issue-12/charles-wright-and-american-south
What is it about a known landscape
that tends to undo us,
That shuffles and picks us out
For terminal demarcation, the way a field of lupine
Seen in profusion deep in the timber
Suddenly seems to rise like a lavender ground fog
At noon?
What is it inside the imagination that keeps surprising us
At odd moments
when something is given back
We didn’t know we had had
In solitude, spontaneously, and with great joy?
(The World of the Ten Thousand Things 69)
This is his true subject: how landscape claims us—not necessarily any particular southern landscape, and not southern landscape in general; not necessarily any particular landscape in Idaho and Montana, and not the landscape of that region in general.
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