Charles Wright Quotes

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,

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.

Everyone knows this.
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride.

I empty myself with light
Until I become morning.

Each word, as someone once wrote, contains the universe.
The visible carries all the invisible on its back.
Tonight, in the unconditional, what moves in the long-limbed grasses,
what touches me
As though I didn't exist?
What is it that keeps on moving,
a tiny pillar of smoke
Erect on its hind legs,
loose in the hollow grasses?
A word I don't know yet, a little word, containing infinity,
Noiseless and unrepentant, in sift through the dry grass.

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.

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.

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 ...
Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it
Year after year,
But who can ever remember enough?

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.

All forms of landscape are autobiographical,

It may not be written in any book, but it is written
You can't go back,
you can't repeat the unrepeatable.

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.

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?

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

Language is the element of definition, the defining and descriptive incantation. It puts the coin between our teeth. It whistles the boat up. It shows us the city of light across the water. Without language there is no poetry, without poetry there's just talk. Talk is cheap and proves nothing. Poetry is dear and difficult to come by. But it poles us across the river and puts a music in our ears. It moves us to contemplation. And what we contemplate, what we sing our hymns to and offer our prayers to, is what will reincarnate us in the natural world, and what will be our one hope for salvation in the What'sToCome.

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.

If you want great tranquility/ It's hard work and a long walk

The ache for anything is a thick dust in the heart.

November's a burn and an ache.

What makes us leave what we love best?
What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself
When we need it most,
That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake
And holds us flush there
until we begin to love it
And have to begin again?
What is it within our own lives we decline to live
Whenever we find it,
making our days unendurable,
And nights almost visionless?
I still don't know yet, but I do it.

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.

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. The voyage into the interior is all that matters, Whatever your ride. Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read. Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times His own weight a day just to stay alive. Now that's a life on the edge.

How many times can summer turn to fall in one life?

May we not be strangers in the lush province of joy

It's linkage I'm talking about, and harmonies and structures, And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.

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.

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He looked like an angelic little boy who had been kicked out of his orphanage for failing to take part in group masturbation.

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

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.

It's up there, and you can see the front of it. But what it is isn't what you're looking at. It's behind what you're looking at.

That I isn't I anymore. It's someone else, the character who plays me, someone who's a better actor than I could ever be. I'm just the writer. Someone else is starring in my part. I remember him just well enough to try to write about him. A case of the negative sublime. I guess art's always after the fact. The real is imaginary, or imagined. Reconstitution, reconstruction, representation is all we're left with. Autobiography becomes biography in the end.

Poetry is the dark side of the moon,

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 ...