Zone Journals (7 page)

Authors: Charles Wright

BOOK: Zone Journals

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Steam stacks, sycamores, brush harbor,
rain like the river falling â¦

â
5 December 1985

âLate afternoon, blue of the sky blue
As a dove's neck, dove
Color of winter branches among winter branches,
Guttural whistle and up,
December violets crooked at my feet,
Cloud-wedge starting to slide like a detached retina
Slanting across the blue
inaction the dove disappears in.

Mean constellations quip and annoy
next night against the same sky
As I seek out, unsuccessfully,
In Luke's spyglass Halley's comet and its train of ice:
An ordered and measured affection is virtuous
In its clean cause
however it comes close in this life.
Nothing else moves toward us out of the stars,
nothing else shines.

â
12 December 1985

âI am poured out like water.
Who wouldn't ask for that
lightning strike
,
the dog's breath on your knee
Seductive and unrehearsed,
The heart resoftened and made apt for illumination,
The body then taken up and its ghostly eyes dried?
Who wouldn't ask for that light,
that liquefaction and entry?

The pentimento ridge line and bulk
Of the Blue Ridge emerge
behind the vanished over-paint
Of the fall leaves across the street,
Cross-hatched and hard-edged, deep blue on blue.
What is a life of contemplation worth in this world?
How far can you go if you concentrate,
how far down?

The afternoon shuts its doors.
The heart tightens its valves,
the dragon maple sunk in its bones,
The grass asleep in its wheel.
The year squeezes to this point, the cold
Hung like a lantern against the dark
burn of a syllable:
I roll it around on my tongue, I warm its edges â¦

â25 December 1985

Light Journal

To speak the prime word and vanish
into the aneurysm
Unhealed and holding the walls open,
Trip and thump of light
up from the fingernails and through
The slack locks and stripped vessels
At last to the inarticulation of desire â¦

What did I think I meant then, Greece, 1959:
Beauty is in the looking for it,
The light here filtered through silk,
The water moving like breathing,
Moving in turn to the tide's turn,
black thread through the water weave.

Whatever it was, I still mean it.

Everyone stands by himself
on the heart of the earth,
Pierced through by a ray of sunlight:
And suddenly it's evening.

It's odd what persists
slip-grained in the memory,
Candescent and held fast,
Odd how for twenty-six years the someone I was once has stayed
Stopped in the columns of light
Through S. Zeno's doors,
trying to take the next step and break clear â¦

A Journal of One Significant Landscape

April again. Aries comes forth
and we are released
Into the filter veins and vast line
Under the elm and apple wood.
The last of the daffodils
Sulphurs the half-jade grass
against the arbor vitae.

Better the bodying forth,
better the coming back.
I listen to what the quince hums,
Its music filling my ear
with its flushed certitude.
Wild onion narrows the latitudes.

I pale and I acquiesce.
Gravity empties me
Stem by stem through its deep regalia,
Resplendent and faintly anodyne,
The green of my unbecoming
urging me earthward.

I long to escape through the white light in the rose root,
At ease in its clean, clear joy:
Unlike the spring flowers, I don't unfold, one petal
after another, in solitudeâ
Happiness happens, like sainthood, in spite of ourselves.

The day dies like a small child,
blushed and without complaint,
Its bedcovers sliding quietly to the floor.
How still the world's room holds,
everything stemming its breath
In exhilaration and sadness.

Halfway through May and I am absolved,
A litter of leaves like half notes
held tight in the singing trees.
Against the board fence, the candle tips of the white pines
Gutter and burn, gutter and burn
on the blue apse of the sky.

How do we get said what must be said,
Seep of the honeysuckle like bad water, yellow
And slick, through the privet hedge,
tiger iris opening like an eye
Watching us steadily now, aware that what we see

In its disappearance and inexactitude
Is not what we think we see.
How does one say these things?
The sheathed beaks of the waxed magnolia
Utter their couched syllables,

Shhh
of noon wind mouthing the last word.
Deep in the crevices and silk ravines of the snow rose,
Under the purple beards at the lily's throat,
silence stocks its cocoon:
Inside, in its radiance,
the right answer waits to be born.

Truthful words are not beautiful,
beautiful words not truthful,
Lao-tzu says. He has a point.
Nor are good words persuasive:
The way of heaven can do no real harm,
and it doesn't contend.

Beginning of June, clouds like medieval banderoles
Out of the sky's mouth
back toward the east,
Explaining the painting as Cimabue once did
In Pisa, in tempera,
angels sending the message out

In those days. Not now, down here
Where the peaches swell like thumbs, and the little apples and
pears
Buzz like unbroken codes on the sun's wire,
their secret shoptalk
The outtakes we would be privy to,

But never are, no matter how hard we look at them or listen.
Still, it's here in its gilt script,
or there, speaking in tongues.
One of the nondescript brown-headed black birds that yawp
And scramble in and out of the trees
latches me with his lean eye

And tells me I'm wasting my time,
something I'm getting used to
In my one life with its one regret
I keep on trundling here
in order to alter it.
You're wasting your time, he tells me again. And I am.

It is not possible to read the then in the now.
It is not possible to see the blood in the needle's eye,
Sky like a sheet of carbon paper
repeating our poor ills
On the other side.
We must be good to each other.

Like a developing photograph,
the dawn hillsides appear
Black-and-white then green then rack-over into color
Down-country along the line,
House and barn as the night blanks
away into morning's fixer â¦

Like dreams awaiting their dreamers, cloud-figures step forth
Then disappear in the sky, ridge lines are cut,
grass moans
Under the sun's touch and drag:
With a sigh the day explains itself, and reliefs into place â¦
Like light bulbs, the pears turn on,
birds plink, the cow skull spins and stares
In heaven's eye, sunshine
Cheesecloths the ground beside the peach trees.
The dragon maple shivers its dry sides â¦

I put down these memorandums of my affections,
As John Clare said,
memory through a secondary
Being the soul of time
and life the principal but its shadow,
July in its second skin glistering through the trees â¦

For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,
Ruysbroeck has told us,
and that is why
He's ever saying to our innermost spirit one deep
Unfathomable word,
and nothing else â¦

Thus stone upon stone,
And circle on circle I raised eternally:
So step after step
I drew back in sure ascension to Paradise,

Someone once wrote about Brunelleschiâ
Giovanbattista Strozzi,
Vasari saysâwhen he died
Vaulting the double dome of S. Maria del Fiore
In Florence,
which everyone said was impossible.

Paolo Uccello, on the other hand, once drew
The four elements as animals:
a mole for earth,
A fish for water, a salamander for fire, and for air
A chameleon which lives on air
and thus will assume whatever color.

In his last days, secluded inside his house, he stayed up
All night in his study, his wife said,
intent on perspective.
O what a lovely thing perspective is, he'd call out.

August thrusts down its flushed face,
disvectored at the horizon.

How is the vanishing point
when you look at it hard?
How does it lie in the diamond zones?
What are the colors of disappearance,
pink and gray,
Diamond and pink and gray?
How are they hard to look at?

September's the month that moves us
out of our instinct:
As the master said:
for knowledge, add something everyday,
To be wise, subtract â¦
This is the season of subtraction,

When what goes away is what stays,
pooled in its own grace,
When loss isn't loss, and fall
Hangs on the cusp of its one responsibility,
Tiny erasures,
palimpsest over the pear trees.

Somewhere inside the landscape
Something reverses.
Leaf lines recoil, the moon switches
Her tides, dry banks begin to appear
In the long conduits
under the skin and in the heart.

I listen to dark October just over the hill,
I listen to what the weeds exhale,
and the pines echo,
Elect in their rectitude:
The idea of emptiness is everything to them.
I smooth myself, I abide.

Chinese Journal

In 1935, the year I was born,
Giorgio Morandi
Penciled these bottles in by leaving them out, letting
The presence of what surrounds them increase the presence
Of what is missing,
keeping its distance and measure.

The purple-and-white spike plants
stand upright and spine-laced,
As though poised to fight by keeping still.
Inside their bristly circle,
The dwarf boxwood
flashes its tiny shields at the sun.

Under the skylight, the Pothos plant
Dangles its fourteen arms
into the absence of its desire.
Like a medusa in the two-ply, celadon air,
Its longing is what it grows on,
heart-leaves in the nothingness.

To shine but not to dazzle.
Falling leaves, falling water,
everything comes to rest.

What can anyone know of the sure machine that makes all things
work?
To find one word and use it correctly,
providing it is the right word,
Is more than enough:
An inch of music is an inch and a half of dust.

Night Journal

The breath of What's-Out-There sags
Like bad weather below the branches,
fog-sided, Venetian,
Trailing its phonemes along the ground.
It says what it has to say
Carefully, without sound, word
After word imploding into articulation
And wherewithal for the unbecome.
I catch its drift.

And if I could answer back,
If once I had a cloudier tongue,
what would I say?
I'd say what it says: nothing, with all its verities
Gone to the ground and hiding:
I'd say what it says now,
Dangling its language like laundry between the dark limbs,
Just hushed in its cleanliness.

The absolute night backs off.
Hard breezes freeze in my eyelids.
The moon, stamped horn of fool's gold,
Answers for me in the arteries of the oak trees.
I long for clear water, the silence
Of risk and deep splendor,
the quietness inside the solitude.
I want its drop on my lip, its cold undertaking.

Notes

Night Journal

Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard (Harper & Row,
1982).

A Journal of the Year of the Ox

Catullus Tibullus and Pervigilium Veneris (Harvard University Press
MCMLXXVI);
The Penguin Book of Italian Verse (Penguin Books,
1960);
Historical Sketches of the Holston Valleys by Thomas W. Preston (The Kingsport Press,
1926); “By
the Banks of the
Holston”
by Jeff Daniel Marion, The Iron Mountain Review, Vol.
1, #2
(Winter 1984); Il Palazzo di Schifanoia by Ranieri Varese, Grafici Editoriale s.r.i. (Bologna, 1983); The Cloud of Unknowing:
An English Mystic of the 14th Century (Bums Oates).

Light Journal

Salvatore Quasimodo, “Ed Ã¨ sÃºbito sera.”

A Journal of One Significant Landscape

Lives of the Artists
by Giorgio Vasari, translated by George Bull (Penguin Books, 1965).

Night Journal II

For Stanley Kunitz.