A Short History of the Shadow: Poems - Softcover

Wright, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374528799 ISBN 13: 9780374528799

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003

Synopsis

Luminous new poems from one who "has long been a poet of gorgeous description" ―William Logan, The New Criterion

Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.
Don't just do something, sit there.
And so I have, so I have,
the seasons curling around me like smoke,
Gone to the end of the earth and back without a sound.―from "Body and Soul II"

This is Charles Wright's first collection of verse since the gathering, in Negative Blue, of his "Appalachian Book of the Dead," a trilogy of trilogies hailed "among the great long poems of the century" (James Longenbach, Boston Review). In A Short History of the Shadow, Wright's return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art resilient in a world haunted by death and the dead.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

LOOKING AROUND

I sit where I always sit, in back of the Buddha,
Red leather wing chair, pony skin trunk
under my feet,
Skylight above me, Chinese and Indian rugs on the floor.
I March, 1998, where to begin again?

Over there's the ur-photograph,
Giorgio Morandi, glasses pushed up on his forehead,
Looking hard at four objects--
Two olive oil tins, one wine bottle, one flower vase,
A universe of form and structure,

The universe constricting in front of his eyes,
angelic orders
And applications scraped down
To paint on an easel stand, some in the frame, some not.
Bologna, my friend, Bologna, world's bite and world's end.

..................

It's only in darkness you can see the light, only
From emptiness that things start to fill,
I read once in a dream, I read in a book
under the pink
Redundancies of the spring peach trees.

Old fires, old geographies.
In that case, make it old, I say, make it singular
In its next resurrection,
White violets like photographs on the tombstone of the yard.

Each year it happens this way, each year
Something dead comes back and lifts up its arms,
puts down its luggage
And says -- in the same costume, down-at-heels, badly sewn --
I bring you good news from the other world.

..................

One hand on the sun, one hand on the moon, both feet bare,
God of the late
Mediterranean Renaissance
Breaststrokes across the heavens.
Easter, and all who've been otherwised peek from their shells,

Thunderheads gathering at the rear
abyss of things,
Lightning, quick swizzle sticks, troubling the dark in-between.
You're everything that I'm not, they think,
I'll fly away, Lord, I'll fly away.

April's agnostic and nickel-plated and skin deep,
Glitter and bead-spangle, haute couture,
The world its runway, slink-step and glide.
Roll the stone slowly as it vogues and turns,
roll the stone slowly.

..................

Well, that was a month ago. May now,
What's sure to arrive has since arrived and been replaced,
Snick-snack, lock and load, grey heart's bull's-eye,
A little noon music out of the trees,
a sonatina in green.

Spring passes. Across the room, on the opposite wall,
A 19th-century photograph
Of the Roman arena in Verona. Inside,
stone tiers and stone gate.
Over the outer portico, the ghost of Catullus at sky's end.

The morning and evening stars never meet,
nor summer and spring: Beauty has been my misfortune,
hard journey, uncomfortable resting place. Whatever it is I have looked for
Is tiny, so tiny it can dance in the palm of my hand.

..................

This is the moment of our disregard --
just after supper,
Unseasonable hail in huddles across the porch,
The dogs whimpering,
thunder and lightning eddying off toward the east,
Nothing to answer back to, nothing to dress us down.

Thus do we slide into our disbelief
and disaffection,
Caught in the weeds and understory of our own lives,
Bad weather, bad dreams.
Proper attention is our refuge now, our perch and our praise.

So? So. The moon has its rain-ring auraed around it --
The more that we think we understand, the less we see,
Back yard becoming an obelisk
Of darkness into the sky,
no hieroglyphs, no words to the wise.

LOOKING AROUND II

Pale sky and one star, pale star,
Twilight twisting down like a slow screw
Into the balsa wood of Saturday afternoon, Late Saturday afternoon,
a solitary plane
Eating its way like a moth across the bolt of dusk
Hung like cheesecloth above us.

Ugo would love this, Ugo Foscolo,
everything outline,
Crepuscular, still undewed,
Ugo, it's said, who never uttered a commonplace,
His soul transfixed by a cypress tree,
The twilight twisted into his heart,
Ugo, immortal, unleavened, when death gave him fame and rest.

..................

Tonight, however's, a different story,
flat, uninterrupted sky,
Memorial Day,
Rain off, then back again, a
Second-hand light, dishcloth light, wrung out and almost gone.
9:30 p.m.,
Lightning bugs, three of them, in my neighbor's yard,
leaping beyond the hedge.

What can I possibly see back here I haven't seen before?
Is landscape, like God, a Heraclitean river?
Is language a night flight and sea-change?

My father was born Victorian,
knee-pants and red ringlets,
Sepia photographs and desk drawers
Vanishing under my ghostly touch.

..................

I sit where I always sit,
knockoff Brown Jordan plastic chair,
East-facing, lingering late spring dusk,
Virginia privet and honeysuckle in full-blown bloom and too sweet,
Sky with its glazed look, and half-lidded.
And here's my bat back,
The world resettled and familiar, a self-wrung sigh.

César Vallejo, on nights like this,
His mind in a crash dive from Paris to South America,
Would look from the Luxembourg
Gardens or some rooftop
For the crack, the tiny crack,
in the east that separates one world from the next,
this one from
That one I look for it too.

Copyright (c) 2002 Charles Wright

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0374528799
• ISBN 13: 9780374528799
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96