Charles Wright

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
...

I seem to have come to the end of something, but don’t know what,
Full moon blood orange just over the top of the redbud tree.
Maundy Thursday tomorrow,
then Good Friday, then Easter in full drag,
...

The structure of landscape is infinitesimal,
Like the structure of music,
seamless, invisible.
Even the rain has larger sutures.
...

The heart is colder then the eye is.
The watchers, the holy ones,
know this, no shortcut to the sky,
A single dog hair can split the wind.
...

My traveling clothes light up the noon.
I've been on my way for a long time
back to the past,
That irreconcilable city.
...

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.
...

There is a heaviness between us,
Nameless, raised from the void, that counts out the sprung hours.
What ash has it come to purify?
...

I sit where I always sit, in back of the Buddha,
Red leather wing chair, pony skin trunk
under my feet,
...

Midmorning like a deserted room, apparition
Of armoire and table weights,
Oblongs of flat light,
...

Already one day has detached itself from all the rest up ahead.
It has my photograph in its soft pocket.
It wants to carry my breath into the past in its bag of wind.
...

Three years ago, in the afternoons,
I used to sit back here and try
To answer the simple arithmetic of my life,
...

The spider, juiced crystal and Milky Way, drifts on his web through the night sky
And looks down, waiting for us to ascend ...
...

Ancient of Days, old friend, no one believes you'll come back.
No one believes in his own life anymore.

The moon, like a dead heart, cold and unstartable, hangs by a thread
...

Bowls will receive us,
and sprinkle black scratch in our eyes.
Later, at the great fork on the untouchable road,
...

The brief secrets are still here,
and the light has come back.
The word remember touches my hand,
...

This is the bird hour, peony blossoms falling bigger than wren hearts
On the cutting border's railroad ties,
Sparrows and other feathery things
Homing from one hedge to the next,
...

Thanksgiving, dark of the moon.
Nothing down here in the underworld but vague shapes and black holes,
...

Sunday, September Sunday ... Outdoors,
Like an early page from The Appalachian Book of the Dead,
Sunlight lavishes brilliance on every surface,
...

The generator hums like a distant ding an sich.
It's early evening, and time, like the dog it is,
...

Darkened by time, the masters, like our memories, mix
And mismatch,
...