Night Journal
Charles Wright
—I think of Issa, a man of few words: The world of dew Is the world of dew. And yet . . . And yet . . .
—Three words contain all that we know for sure of the next life Or the last one: Close your eyes. Everything else is gossip, false mirrors, trick windows Flashing like Dutch glass In the undiminishable sun.
—I write it down in visible ink, Black words that disappear when held up to the light— I write it down not to remember but to forget, Words like thousands of pieces of shot film exposed to the sun. I never see anything but the ground.
—Everyone wants to tell his story. The Chinese say we live in the world of the ten thousand things, Each of the ten thousand things crying out to us Precisely nothing, A silence whose tune we’ve come to understand, Words like birthmarks, embolic sunsets drying behind the tongue. If we were as eloquent, If what we say could spread the good news the way that dogwood does, Its votive candles phosphorous and articulate in the green haze Of spring, surely something would hear us.
—Even a chip of beauty is beauty intractable in the mind, Words the color of wind Moving across the fields there wind-addled and wind-sprung, Abstracted as water glints, The fields lion-colored and rope-colored, As in a picture of Paradise, the bodies languishing over the sky Trailing their dark identities That drift off and sieve away to the nothingness Behind them moving across the fields there As words move, slowly, trailing their dark identities.
—Our words, like blown kisses, are swallowed by ghosts Along the way, their destinations bereft In a rub of brightness unending: How distant everything always is, and yet how close, Music starting to rise like smoke from under the trees.
—Birds sing an atonal row unsyncopated From tree to tree, dew chants Whose songs have no words from tree to tree When night puts her dark lens in, One on this limb, two others back there.
—Words, like all things, are caught in their finitude. They start here, they finish here No matter how high they rise— my judgment is that I know this And never love anything hard enough That would stamp me and sink me suddenly into bliss.
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