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    Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems
    Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems
    Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems
    Ebook282 pages3 hours

    Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems

    By Charles Wright

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    About this ebook

    Negative Blue is the culmination of the cycle that won Wright the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award.

    Time will append us like suit coats left out overnight
    On a deck chair, loose change dead weight in the right pocket,
    Silk handkerchief limp with dew,
    sleeves in a slow dance with the wind.
    And love will kill us--
    Love, and the winds from under the earth
    that grind us to grain-out.
    --from "Still Life with Spring and Time to Burn"

    When Charles Wright published Appalachia in 1998, it marked the completion of a nine-volume project, of which James Longenbach wrote in the Boston Review, "Charles Wright's trilogy of trilogies--call it 'The Appalachian Book of the Dead'--is sure to be counted among the great long poems of the century."

    The first two of those trilogies were collected in Country Music (1982) and The World of the Ten Thousand Things (1990). Here Wright adds to his third trilogy (Chickamauga [1995], Black Zodiac [1997], and Appalachia [1998]) a section of new poems that suggest new directions in the work of this sensuous, spirit-haunted poet.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 29, 2014
    ISBN9781466877504
    Negative Blue: Selected Later 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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      Book preview

      Negative Blue - Charles Wright

      CHICKAMAUGA

      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 rock.

      UNDER THE NINE TREES IN JANUARY

      Last night’s stars and last night’s wind

      Are west of the mountains now, and east of the river.

      Here, under the branches of the nine trees,

                                                               how small the world seems.

      Should we lament, in winter, our shadow’s solitude,

      Our names spelled out like snowflakes?

      Where is it written, the season’s decrease diminishes me?

      Should we long for stillness,

                                                        a hush for the trivial body

      Washed in the colors of paradise,

      Dirt-colored water-colored match-flame-and-wind-colored?

      As one who has never understood the void,

                                                                                   should I

      Give counsel to the darkness, honor the condor’s wing?

      Should we keep on bowing to

                                                      an inch of this and an inch of that?

      The world is a handkerchief.

      Today I spread it across my knees.

      Tomorrow they’ll fold it into my breast pocket,

                                                                            white on my dark suit.

      AFTER READING WANG WEI, I GO OUTSIDE TO THE FULL MOON

      Back here, old snow like lace cakes,

      Candescent and brittle now and then through the tall grass.

      Remorse, remorse, the dark drones.

      The body’s the affliction,

      No resting place in the black pews of the winter trees,

      No resting place in the clouds.

      Mercy upon us, old man,

      You in the China dust, I this side of my past life,

      Salt in the light of heaven.

      Isolate landscape. World’s grip.

      The absolute, as small as a poker chip, moves off,

      Bright moon shining between pines.

      EASTER 1989

      March is the month of slow

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