A Short History of the Shadow Poems

by Wright, Charles

• ISBN13: 9780374528799
• ISBN10: 0374528799
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-04-02
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

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, inNegative 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). InA 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. Charles Wrightwas awarded the National Book Award in Poetry in 1983 forCountry Musicand the 1995 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize forChickamauga. In 2008, he was honored for his lifetime achievement with the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. He teaches at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. This is Wright's first collection of verse since the gathering, inNegative Blue, of the three books he called hisAppalachian Book of the Deadan extended work "sure to be counted among the great long poems of the century" (James Longenbach,Boston Review). In these new poems, Wright speaks and muses in the modes of pastoral, elegy, and homagemethods of poetic address he has made his ownwith characteristic restlessness, wit, perception, and meditative insight. InA Short History of the Shadow, in a world haunted by death and the dead, Wright's return to the landscapes of his early work finds his art, as ever, resilient, haunting, and singular. "The premier poet in America . . . No one makes the music Charles Wright makes."Virginia Quarterly Review "The premier poet in America . . . No one makes the music Charles Wright makes."Virginia Quarterly Review "Wright, Tennessean by birth and Italian by sensibility (he taught himself to write by translating Montale in the sixties), invokes Dante with an Appalachian tongue."The New Yorker "[Wright] finds the sublime in the unlikeliest places, and at his best makes you think such places are exactly where to look."William Logan,The New Criterion "There are precious few poets in whose work I find as much sheer wisdom as in Wright's . . . The whole world seems to orbit in a kind of meditative, slow circle around Wright's grave influence."David Baker,Poetry "Wright, who wrote his first poem as an Army intelligence officer in Italy in 1959 after reading Erza Pound, studied at the Iowa Writer's Workshop when poetry was moving from formal verse to free verse. Carefully constructed pieces of architecture made to look breezy and effortless, his poems reflect those opposing forces. Reading his work [transports] you to another world."Amy Sparks,The Cleveland Plain Dealer "[Readers] will find their efforts well rewarded by the vividness and inventiveness of this poet's descriptive writing, by the evocative music of his language, and by the centrality of the issues he raises as he explores the human condition . . . These poems will assuredly spark keen insights in their readers and will deepen appreciation for the continuing excellence of Wright's artistic achievement."John Lang,Appalachian Heritage "No attentive reader would ever mistake Wright's

Author Biography

Charles Wright teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Table of Contents

Looking Around
Looking Around	p. 3
Looking Around II	p. 6
Looking Around III	p. 9
Millennium Blues
Citronella	p. 15
If This Is Where God's At, Why Is That Fish Dead?	p. 16
Charlottesville Nocturne	p. 17
It's Dry Enough for Sure, Dry Enough to Spit Cotton	p. 18
If My Glasses Were Better, I Could See Where I'm Headed For	p. 19
Lost Language	p. 20
On Heaven Considered as What Will Cover Us and Stony Comforter	p. 21
Mildly Depressed, Far from Home, I Go Outside for a While	p. 22
Mondo Orfeo	p. 23
The Secret of Poetry	p. 24
Night Music
In Praise of Thomas Hardy	p. 27
Night Rider	p. 28
Is	p. 32
Polaroids	p. 33
Nostalgia	p. 36
A Short History of the Shadow	p. 38
River Run	p. 40
Appalachian Lullaby	p. 41
Night Music	p. 43
Relics
Thinking of Wallace Stevens at the Beginning of Spring	p. 47
Relics	p. 48
Why, It's as Pretty as a Picture	p. 50
Nine-Panel Yaak River Screen	p. 52
The Wind Is Calm and Comes from Another World	p. 57
Summer Mornings	p. 58
Thinking of Marsilio Ficino at the First Hint of Autumn	p. 61
Via Negativa	p. 62
Ars Poetica III	p. 65
'54 Chevy	p. 67
Nostalgia II	p. 68
Body and Soul
Body and Soul	p. 71
Hard Dreams	p. 74
Body and Soul II	p. 77
Notes	p. 81
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

    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. 1 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.

* * *

Now into June, cloverheads tight, Seurating the yard, This land-washed jatte fireflied and Corgied. How sweet familiarity is, With its known bird songs, its known smudges. Today, as Machado said, is every day and all days. A little wind from the southwest, a little wind in the apple tree.

And dusk descending, or dusk rising, Sky flat as a sheet, smooth as bedclothes on a dead woman's bed.

It's always this way at 9 p.m., Half moon like a cleaved ox wheel In miniature, Machado smooth as a night bird half-asleep in the gum tree.

* * *

Crepuscularum. The back yard etched in and scored by Lack of light. What's dark gets darker against the shrinking, twilit sky, Hedgerow and hemlock and maple tree. A couple of lightning bugs. Dog bark and summer smell. Mosquitos. The evening star.

Been rode hard and put up wet, someone said to me once In Kalispell, meaning, I hope I'm being used for a higher good, Or one I'm not aware of. Dino Campana could have said that. Said it and meant, Lord, that's it. And please turn off the light. And he did.

LOOKING AROUND III

August. Cloud-forest Chinese Ming screen Beyond the south meadow and up the attendant feeder hills. No wind and a steady rain. Raven squawk and swallow bank, screen shift at meadow mouth. I find I have nothing to say to any of this.

Northwest Montana under the summer's backlash and wet watch. The tall marsh grass kneels to their bidding. The waters of Basin Creek pucker their tiny lips, their thousand tiny lips. The clouds shatter and the clouds re-form. I find I have nothing to say to any of this.

* * *

Osip Mandelstam, toward the end of his short, word-fiery life, Said heaven was whole, and that flowers live forever. He also said what's ahead of us is only someone's word-- We were born to escort the dead, and be escorted ourselves. Down by the creek bank, the sound that the water makes is almost human.

Down by the creek bank, the water sound Is almost like singing, a song in praise of itself. The light, like a water spider, stretches across the backwash. Under the big spruce at the channel's bend, someone's name and dates Mirror the sky, whose way, like Mandelstam's, was lost in the sky.

* * *

Last night like spider light webbed and still in the tall grass, Twin fawns and a doe at the salt lick, Hail-battered marigolds and delphinium against the cabin wall, Coyote about to trot out Behind the diversion ditch and head for his breakfast.

I don't understand how white clouds can cover the earth. I don't understand how a line of verse can fall from the sky. I don't understand how the meadow mouth opens and closes. I don't understand why the water keeps saying yes, O, yes. I don't understand the black lake that pools in my heart.

* * *

Late afternoon and long shadows across the deer ford, Mt. Henry volcanic and hushed against the west sky and cloud clot. Dante, according to Mandelstam, Was not descriptive, was never descriptive, his similes Exposing the inner image of the structure's force--

Birds were a pilgrimage, for instance, rivers political. Cloud and cloud-flow having their way, cloud-rags and cloud-rugs Inching across the upper meadow, now the lower. Inside the image inside the image is the image, he might have added, Crystalline, pristine. But he didn't.

* * *

I sit where I always sit, northwest window on Basin Creek, A homestead cabin from 1912, Pine table knocked together some 30 years ago, Indian saddle blanket, Peruvian bedspread And Mykonos woven rug nailed up on the log walls.

Whose childhood is this in little rectangles over the chair? Two kids with a stringer of sunfish, Two kids in their bathing suits, the short shadows of evergreens? Under the meadow's summer coat, forgotten bones have turned black. O, not again, goes the sour song of the just resurrected.

* * *

To look hard at something, to look through it, is to transform it, Convert it into something beyond itself, to give it grace. For over 30 years I've looked at this meadow and mountain landscape Till it's become iconic and small And sits, like a medieval traveller's triptych, radiant in its disregard.

All morning the donors have knelt, in profile, where the creeks meet, The thin spruce have listened to what the rustle is, and nodded-- Like coyote's ears, they're split in the wind. Tonight, after 10 p.m., the moon will varnish everything With a brilliance worthy, wherever that is, of Paradise.

Excerpted from A Short History of the Shadow by Charles Wright. Copyright © 2002 by Charles Wright. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.