NEGATIVE BLUE P: Selected Later Poems - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charles Wright is a French writer, journalist, and a former Jesuit novice. His earlier book, Le Chemin des Estives, narrates his journey through the Massif Central, in south-central France. That book won the fourth annual Prix de la liberté intérieure in 2021.

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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...