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    Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems
    Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems
    Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems
    Ebook321 pages4 hours

    Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems

    By Charles Wright

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    About this ebook

    Over the course of nineteen collections of poems, Charles Wright has built "one of the truly distinctive bodies of poetry created in the second half of the twentieth century" (David Young, Contemporary Poets). Bye-and-Bye, which brings together selections from Wright's more recent work—including the entirety of Littlefoot, Wright's moving, book-length meditation on mortality—showcases the themes and images that have defined his mature work: the true affinity between writer and subject, human and nature; the tenuous relationship between description and actuality; and the search for a truth that transcends change and death.

    Bye-and-Bye is a wonderful introduction to the late work of one of America's finest and best-loved poets.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 15, 2014
    ISBN9781466877481
    Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems
    Author

    Charles Wright

    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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    • 4/5
      I used to imagine that word-sway and word-thunder
      Would silence the Silence and all that,
      That words were the Word,
      That language could lead us inexplicably to grace,
      As though it were geographical.
      I used to think these things when I was young.
      I still do.

      I didn't care for the early sections, the winnowed caprice of Black Zodiac wasn't as present, filtered. The author's arc of memory and nature's symphony kept my attention. There was an ultimate reward.

      A vision of Kafka, one who is offered soft cheese and bread and then leaves as a spring sunbeam is an arresting image. The Carter Family as memento mori. Dr. Burton would be content. Each image offers an idea or an association. Wright measures mortality in a veritable book of snow. Each step ephemeral.

    Book preview

    Bye-and-Bye - Charles Wright

    FROM

    A SHORT HISTORY OF THE SHADOW

    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, gray 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

    Secondhand 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

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