Zone Journals
Yard Journal
--Mist in the trees, and soiled water and grass cuttings splotch The driveway, afternoon starting to bulk up in the west A couple of hours down the road: Strange how the light hubs out and wheels concentrically back and forth After a rain, as though the seen world Quavered inside a water bead swung from a grass blade: The past is never the past: it lies like a long tongue We walk down into the moist mouth of the future, where new teeth Nod like new stars around us, And winds that itch us, and plague our ears, sound curiously like the old songs.
--Deep dusk and lightning bugs alphabetize on the east wall, The carapace of the sky blue-ribbed and buzzing Somehow outside it all, Trees dissolving against the night's job, houses melting in air: Somewhere out there an image is biding its time, Burning like Abraham in the cold, swept expanses of heaven,Waiting to take me in and complete my equation: What matters is abstract, and is what love is, Candescent inside the memory, continuous And unexpungable, as love is ...
--Blue jay's bound like a kangaroo's in the lawn's high grass, Then up in a brushstroke and over the hedge in one arc. Light weights down the azalea plants, Yesterday's cloud banks enfrescoed still just under the sky's cornice, Cardinal quick transfusion into the green arm of the afternoon. Wax-like flowers of sunlight drift through the dwarf orchard and float Under the pygmied peaches and pears All over America, and here, too, the blossoms Continuing down from nowhere, out of the blue. The mockingbird's shadow is burned in the red clay below him.
--Exclusion's the secret: what's missing is what appears Most visible to the eye: the more luminous anything is, The more it subtracts what's around it, Peeling away the burned skin of the world making the unseen seen: Body by new body they all rise into the light Tactile and still damp, That rhododendron and dogwood tree, that spruce, An architecture of absence, a landscape whose wordsAre imprints, dissolving images after the eyelids close: I take them away to keep them there--that hedgehom, for instance, that stalk ...
--A bumblebee the size of my thumb rises like Geryon From the hard Dantescan gloom Under my window sash to lip the rain gutter's tin bolgia, Then backs out like a hummingbird spiraling languidly out of sight, Shoulders I've wanted to sit on, a ride I've wanted to take, Deposited into the underlight of cities thronged in the grass, Fitful illuminations, iron-colored plain that lies Littered with music and low fires, stone edge of the pit At the end of every road, First faces starting to swim up: Bico, my man, are you here?
Copyright © 1988 by Charles Wright