NEGATIVE BLUE P: Selected Later Poems - Softcover

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Charles Wright is the United States Poet Laureate. His poetry collections include Country Music, Black Zodiac, Chickamauga, Bye-and-Bye: Selected Later Poems, Sestets, and Caribou. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the 2013 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. Born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee in 1935, he currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Excerpt

SITTING OUTSIDE AT THE END OF AUTUMN

Three years ago, in the afternoons,
                         I used to sit back here and try
To answer the simple arithmetic of my life,
But never could figure it?
This object and that object
Never contained the landscape
                              nor all of its implications,
This tree and that shrub
Never completely satisfied the sum or quotient
I took from or carried to,
                            nor do they do so now,
Though I'm back here again, looking to calculate,
Looking to see what adds up.

Everything comes from something,
                       only something comes from nothing,
Lao Tzu says, more or less.
Eminently sensible, I say,
Rubbing this tiny snail shell between my thumb and two fingers.
Delicate as an earring,
                        it carries its emptiness like a child
It would be rid of.
I rub it clockwise and counterclockwise, hoping for anything
Resplendent in its vocabulary or disguise?
But one and one make nothing, he adds,
                                        endless and everywhere,
The shadow that everything casts.

READING LAO TZU AGAIN IN THE NEW YEAR

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 ...

Old year, new year, old song, new song,
                                         nothing will change hands
Each time we change heart, each time
Like a hard cloud that has drifted all day through the sky
Toward the night's shrugged shoulder
                                      with its epaulet of stars.

* * *

Prosodies rise and fall.
                          Structures rise in the mind and fall.
Failure reseeds the old ground.
Does the grass, with its inches in two worlds, love the dirt?
Does the snowflake the raindrop?

I've heard that those who know will never tell us,
                                                   and heard
That those who tell us will never know.
Words are wrong.
Structures are wrong.
                      Even the questions are compromise.

Desire discriminates and language discriminates:
They form no part of the essence of all things:
                                                 each word
Is a failure, each object
We name and place
                   leads us another step away from the light.

Loss is its own gain.
                       Its secret is emptiness.
Our images lie in the flat pools of their dark selves
Like bodies of water the tide moves.
They move as the tide moves.
                              Its secret is emptiness.

* * *

Four days into January,
                         the grass grows tiny, tiny
Under the peach trees.
Wind from the Blue Ridge tumbles the hat
Of daylight farther and farther
                                 into the eastern counties.

Sunlight spray on the ash limbs.
                                  Two birds
Whistle at something unseen, one black note and one interval.
We're placed between now and not-now,
                                        held by affection,
Large rock balanced upon a small rock.

UNDER THE NINE TREES IN JANUARY

Last night's stars and last night's wind
Are west of the mountains now, and east of the river.
Here, under the branches of the nine trees,
                                 how small the world seems.

Should we lament, in winter, our shadow's solitude,
Our names spelled out like snowflakes?
Where is it written, the season's decrease diminishes me?

Should we long for stillness,
                               a hush for the trivial body
Washed in the colors of paradise,
Dirt-colored water-colored match-flame-and-wind-colored?

As one who has never understood the void,
                                           should I
Give counsel to the darkness, honor the condor's wing?
Should we keep on bowing to
                          an inch of this and an inch of that?

The world is a handkerchief.
Today I spread it across my knees.
Tomorrow they'll fold it into my breast pocket,
                                         white on my dark suit.

AFTER READING WANG WEI,
I GO OUTSIDE TO THE FULL MOON

Back here, old snow like lace cakes,
Candescent and brittle now and then through the tall grass.
Remorse, remorse, the dark drones.

The body's the affliction,
No resting place in the black pews of the winter trees,
No resting place in the clouds.

Mercy upon us, old man,
You in the China dust, I this side of my past life,
Salt in the light of heaven.

Isolate landscape. World's grip.
The absolute, as small as a poker chip, moves off,
Bright moon shining between pines.

EASTER 1989

March is the month of slow fire,
                                 new grasses stung with rain,
Cold-shouldered, white-lipped.
Druidic crocus circles appear
Overnight, morose in their purple habits,
                                           wet cowls
Glistening in the cut sun.

* * *

Instinct will end us.
The force that measles the peach tree
                                       will divest and undo us.
The power that kicks on
                         the cells in the lilac bush
Will tumble us down and down.
Under the quince tree, purple cross points, and that's all right

For the time being,
                    the willow across the back fence
Menacing in its green caul.
When the full moon comes
                         gunning under the cloud's cassock
Later tonight, the stations
Will start to break forth like stars, their numbers flashing and then some.

Belief is a paltry thing
                          and will betray us, soul's load scotched
Against the invisible.
We are what we've always thought we were?

Peeling the membrane back,
                          amazed, like the jonquil's yellow head
Butting the nothingness?
                          in the wrong place, in the wrong body.

The definer of all things
                          cannot be spoken of.
It is not knowledge or truth.
We get no closer than next-to-it.
Beyond wisdom, beyond denial,
                                it asks us for nothing,
According to Pseudo-Dionysus, which sounds good to me.

* * *

Nubbly with enzymes,
The hardwoods gurgle and boil in their leathery sheaths.
Flame flicks the peony's fuse.
Out of the caves of their locked beings,
                                         fluorescent shapes
Roll the darkness aside as they rise to enter the real world.

READING RORTY AND PAUL CELAN
ONE MORNING IN EARLY JUNE

In the skylight it's Sunday,
A little aura between the slats of the Venetian blinds.
Outside the front window,
                          a mockingbird balances
Gingerly on a spruce branch.
At the Munch house across the street,
Rebecca reads through the paper, then stares at her knees
On the front porch.
                    Church bell. Weed-eater's cough and spin.

From here, the color of mountains both is and is not,
Beginning of June,
Haze like a nesting bird in the trees,
The Blue Ridge partial,
                        then not partial,
Between the staff lines of the telephone wires and pine tips
That sizzle like E.T.'s finger.
Mid-nineties, and summer officially still three weeks away.

* * *

If truth is made and not found,
                                what an amazing world
We live in, more secret than ever
And beautiful of access.
Goodbye, old exits, goodbye, old entrances, the way
Out is the way in at last,
Two-hearted sorrow of middle age,
                                  substanceless blue,
Benevolent anarchy to tan and grow old with.

If sentences constitute
                         everything we believe,
Vocabularies retool
Our inability to measure and get it right,
And languages don't exist.
That's one theory. Here's another:
Something weighs on our shoulders
And settles itself like black light
                                     invisibly in our hair ...

* * *

Pool table. Zebra rug.
                       Three chairs in a half circle.
Buck horns and Ca' Paruta.
Gouache of the Clinchfield station in Kingsport, Tennessee.
High tide on the Grand Canal,
                              San Zeno in late spring
Taken by "Ponti" back in the nineteenth century.
I see the unknown photographer
                         under his dark cloth. Magnesium flash.
Silence. I hear what he has to say.

June 3rd, heat like Scotch tape on the skin,
Mountains the color of nothing again,
                                      then something through mist.

In Tuscany, on the Sette Ponti, Gròpina dead-ends
Above the plain and the Arno's marauding cities,
Columns eaten by darkness,
Cathedral unsentenced and plugged in
To what's-not-there,
                     windows of alabaster, windows of flame.

AFTER READING TU FU, I GO
OUTSIDE TO THE DWARF ORCHARD

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
                                         looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
                       I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
                  Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.

The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
                                           up from the damp grass.
Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.

THINKING OF DAVID SUMMERS
AT THE BEGINNING OF WINTER

December, five days till Christmas,
                                    mercury red-lined
In the low twenties, glass throat
Holding the afternoon half-hindered
And out of luck.
              Goodbye to my last poem, "Autumn Thoughts."

Two electric wall heaters
                       thermostat on and off,
Ice one-hearted and firm in the mouth of the downspout
Outside, snow stiff as a wedding dress
Carelessly left unkempt
                        all week in another room.

Everything we desire is somewhere else,
                                     day too short,
Night too short, light snuffed and then relit,
Road salted and sanded down,
Sky rolling the white of its eye back
                                   into its head.

Reinvention is what we're after,
                                 Pliny's outline,
Living in history without living in the past
Is what the task is,
Quartering our desire,
                    making what isn't as if it were.

CICADA

All morning I've walked about,
                               opening books and closing books,
Sitting in this chair and that chair,
Steady drip on the skylight,
                          steady hum of regret.
Who listens to anyone?
Across the room, bookcases,
                            across the street, summer trees.

Hear what the book says:
                         This earthly light
Is a seasoning, tempting and sweet and dangerous.
Resist the allurements of the eye.
Feet still caught in the toils of this world's beauty,
                                                       resist
The gratifications of the eye.

* * *

Noon in the early September rain.
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,
Fills us in ways we can't lay claim to,

Ways immense and without names,
                                husk burning like amber

On tree bark, cicada wind-bodied,
Leaves beginning to rustle now
                                  in the dark tree of the self.

* * *

If time is water, appearing and disappearing
In one heliotropic cycle,
                          this rain
That sluices as through an hourglass
Outside the window into the gutter and downspout,
Measures our nature
                       and moves the body to music.

The book says, however,
                     time is not body's movement
But memory of body's movement.
Time is not water but the memory of water:
We measure what isn't there.
We measure the silence.
                        We measure the emptiness.

TENNESSEE LINE

Afternoon overcast the color of water
                                   smoothed by clouds
That whiten where they enter the near end of the sky.
First day of my fifty-fifth year,
Last week of August limp as a frayed rope in the trees,
Yesterday's noise a yellow dust in my shirt pocket
Beneath the toothpick,
                       the .22 bullet and Amitone.

Sounds drift through the haze,
The shadowless orchard, peach leaves dull in the tall grass,
No wind, no bird shudder.
Green boat on the red Rivanna.
                               Rabbit suddenly in place
By the plum tree, then gone in three bounds.
Downshift of truck gears.

* * *

In 1958, in Monterey, California,
I wrote a journal of over one hundred pages
About the Tennessee line,
About my imagined unhappiness,
                               and how the sun set like a coffin
Into the grey Pacific.
How common it all was.
                       How uncommon I pictured myself.

Memento scrivi, skull-like and word-drunk,
                                      one hundred fourteen pages

Of inarticulate self-pity
Looking at landscape and my moral place within it,
The slurry of words inexorable and dark,
The ethical high ground inexorable and dark
I droned from
            hoping for prescience and a shibboleth ...

* * *

I remember the word and forget the word
                                        although the word
Hovers in flame around me.
Summer hovers in flame around me.
The overcast breaks like a bone above the Blue Ridge.
A loneliness west of solitude
Splinters into the landscape
                             uncomforting as Braille.

We are our final vocabulary,
                             and how we use it.
There is no secret contingency.
There's only the rearrangement, the redescription
Of little and mortal things.
There's only this single body, this tiny garment
Gathering the past against itself,
                                making it otherwise.

LOOKING OUTSIDE THE CABIN WINDOW,
I REMEMBER A LINE BY LI PO

The river winds through the wilderness,
Li Po said
           of another place and another time.
It does so here as well, sliding its cargo of dragon scales
To gutter under the snuff
                       of marsh willow and tamarack.

Mid-morning, Montana high country,
Jack snipe poised on the scarred fence post,
Pond water stilled and smoothed out,
Swallows dog-fighting under the fast-moving storm clouds.

Expectantly empty, green as a pocket, the meadow waits
For the wind to rise and fill it,
                               first with a dark hand
Then with the rain's loose silver
A second time and a third
                          as the day doles out its hours.

Sunlight reloads and ricochets off the window glass.
Behind the cloud scuts,
                        inside the blue aorta of the sky,
The River of Heaven flows
With its barge of stars,
                   waiting for darkness and a place to shine.

We who would see beyond seeing
                  see only language, that burning field.

MID-WINTER SNOWFALL
IN THE PIAZZA DANTE

Verona, late January ...
                         Outside the calfè,
The snow, like papier-mâché, settles
Its strips all over Dante's bronze body, and holds fast.

Inside, a grappa
In one hand, a double espresso in the other,
I move through the room, slowly,
                              from chessboard to chessboard.

It's Tuesday, tournament night.
Dante's statue, beyond the window, grows larger and whiter
Under the floodlights
                   and serious Alpine snowfall.

In here I understand nothing,
                           not the chess, not the language,
Not even the narrow, pointed shoes the men all wear.
It's 1959. It's ten-thirty at night. I've been in the country for one week.

The nineteenth-century plush
                             on the chairs and loveseats
Resonates, purple and gold.
Three boards are in play in the front room, one in the bar.

My ignorance is immense,
                         as is my happiness.
Caught in the glow of all things golden
And white, I think, at twenty-three, my life has finally begun.

At a side table, under
The tulip-shaped lamps, a small group drinks to a wedding:
"Tutti maschi, "the groom toasts,
                                           and everyone lifts his full glass.

The huge snowflakes like soft squares
Alternately black and white in the flat light of the piazza,
I vamp in the plush and gold of the mirrors,
                                          in love with the world.

That was thirty years ago.
I've learned a couple of things since then
                                           not about chess
Or plush or all things golden and white.

Unlike a disease, whatever I've learned
Is not communicable.
                     A singular organism,
It does its work in the dark.

Anything that we think we've learned,
                                      we've learned in the dark.
If there is one secret to this life, it is this life.
This life and its hand-me-downs,
                                 bishop to pawn 4, void's gambit.

Excerpted from Negative Blueby Charles Wright Copyright © 2001 by Charles Wright. Excerpted by permission.
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