Read an Excerpt
Appalachia
By Charles Wright Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1998 Charles Wright
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7746-7
CHAPTER 1
Stray Paragraphs in February, Year of the Rat
East of town, the countryside unwrinkles and smooths out
Unctuously toward the tidewater and gruff Atlantic.
A love of landscape's a true affection for regret, I've found,
Forever joined, forever apart,
outside us yet ourselves.
Renunciation, it's hard to learn, is now our ecstasy.
However, if God were still around,
he'd swallow our sighs in his nothingness.
The dregs of the absolute are slow sift in my blood,
Dead branches down after high winds, dead yard grass and undergrowth —
The sure accumulation of all that's not revealed
Rises like snow in my bare places,
cross-whipped and openmouthed.
Our lives can't be lived in flames.
Our lives can't be lit like saints' hearts,
seared between heaven and earth.
February, old head-turner, cut us some slack, grind of bone
On bone, such melancholy music.
Lift up that far corner of landscape,
there, toward the west.
Let some of the deep light in, the arterial kind.
Stray Paragraphs in April, Year of the Rat
Only the dead can be born again, and then not much.
I wish I were a mole in the ground,
eyes that see in the dark.
Attentive without an object of attentiveness,
Unhappy without an object of unhappiness —
Desire in its highest form,
dog prayer, diminishment ...
If we were to walk for a hundred years, we could never take
One step toward heaven —
you have to wait to be gathered.
Two cardinals, two blood clots,
Cast loose in the cold, invisible arteries of the air.
If they ever stop, the sky will stop.
Affliction's a gift, Simone Weil thought —
The world becomes more abundant in severest light.
April, old courtesan, high-styler of months, dampen our mouths.
The dense and moist and cold and dark come together here.
The soul is air, and it maintains us.
Basic Dialogue
The transformation of objects in space,
or objects in time,
To objects outside either, but tactile, still precise ...
It's always the same problem —
Nothing's more abstract, more unreal,
than what we actually see.
The job is to make it otherwise.
Two dead crepe-myrtle bushes,
tulips petal-splayed and swan-stemmed,
All blossoms gone from the blossoming trees — the new loss
Is not like old loss,
Winter-kill, a jubilant revelation, an artificial thing
Linked and lifted by pure description into the other world.
Self-oblivion, sacred information, God's nudge —
I think I'll piddle around by the lemon tree, thorns
Sharp as angel's teeth.
I think
I'll lie down in the dandelions, the purple and white violets.
I think I'll keep on lying there, one eye cocked toward heaven.
April eats from my fingers,
nibble of dogwood, nip of pine.
Now is the time, Lord.
Syllables scatter across the new grass, in search of their words.
Such minor Armageddons.
Beside the waters of disremembering,
I lay me down.
Star Turn
Nothing is quite as secretive as the way the stars
Take off their bandages and stare out
At the night,
that dark rehearsal hall,
And whisper their little songs,
The alpha and beta ones, the ones from the great fire.
Nothing is quite as gun shy,
the invalid, broken pieces
Drifting and rootless, rising and falling, forever
Deeper into the darkness.
Nightly they give us their dumb show, nightly they flash us
Their message and melody,
frost-sealed, our lidless companions.
A Bad Memory Makes You a Metaphysician, a Good One Makes You a Saint
This is our world, high privet hedge on two sides,
half-circle of arborvitae,
Small strip of sloped lawn,
Last of the spring tulips and off-purple garlic heads
Snug in the cutting border,
Dwarf orchard down deep at the bottom of things,
God's crucible,
Bat-swoop and grab, grackle yawp, back yard ...
This is our landscape,
Bourgeois, heartbreakingly suburban;
these are the ashes we rise from.
As night goes down, we watch it darken and disappear.
We push our glasses back on our foreheads,
look hard, and it disappears.
In another life, the sun shines and the clouds are motionless.
There, too, the would-be-saints are slipping their hair shirts on.
But only the light souls can be saved;
Only the ones whose weight
will not snap the angel's wings.
Too many things are not left unsaid.
If you want what the syllables want, just do your job.
Thinking about the Poet Larry Levis One Afternoon in Late May
Rainy Saturday, Larry dead
almost three weeks now,
Rain starting to pool in the low spots
And creases along the drive.
Between showers, the saying goes,
Roses and rhododendron wax glint
Through dogwood and locust leaves,
Flesh-colored, flesh-destined, spring in false flower, goodbye.
The world was born when the devil yawned,
the legend goes,
And who's to say it's not true,
Color of flesh, some inner and hidden bloom of flesh.
Rain back again, then back off,
Sunlight suffused like a chest pain across the tree limbs.
God, the gathering night, assumes it.
We haven't a clue as to what counts
In the secret landscape behind the landscape we look at here.
We just don't know what matters,
May dull and death-distanced,
Sky half-lit and grackle-ganged —
It's all the same dark, it's all the same absence of dark.
Part of the rain has now fallen, the rest still to fall.
In the Kingdom of the Past, the Brown-Eyed Man Is King
It's all so pitiful, really, the little photographs
Around the room of places I've been,
And me in them, the half-read books, the fetishes, this
Tiny arithmetic against the dark undazzle.
Who do we think we're kidding?
Certainly not our selves, those hardy perennials
We take such care of, and feed, who keep on keeping on
Each year, their knotty egos like bulbs
Safe in the damp and dreamy soil of their self-regard.
No way we bamboozle them with these
Shrines to the woebegone, ex votos and reliquary sites
One comes in on one's knees to,
The country of what was, the country of what we pretended to be,
Cruxes and intersections of all we'd thought was fixed.
There is no guilt like the love of guilt.
Passing the Morning under the Serenissima
Noon sun big as a knuckle,
tight over Ponte S. Polo,
Unlike the sighting of Heraclitus the Obscure,
Who said it's the width of a man's foot.
Unable to take the full
"clarity" of his fellow man,
He took to the mountains and ate grasses and wild greens,
Aldo Buzzi retells us.
Sick, dropsical, he returned to the city and stretched out on the ground
And covered his body with manure
To dry himself out.
After two days of cure, he died,
Having lost all semblance of humanity, and was devoured by dogs.
Known as "the weeping philosopher," he said one time,
The living and the dead, the waked and the sleeping, are the same.
Thus do we entertain ourselves on hot days, Aldo Buzzi,
Cees Nooteboom, Gustave Flaubert,
The flies and nameless little insects
circling like God's angels
Over the candy dish and worn rug.
The sun, no longer knuckle or foot,
strays behind June's flat clouds.
Boats bring their wild greens and bottled water down the
Republic's shade-splotched canals.
Venetian Dog
Bad day in Bellini country, Venetian dog high-stepper
Out of Carpaccio and down the street,
tail like a crozier
Over his ivory back.
A Baron Corvo bad day, you mutter, under your short breath.
Listen, my friend, everything works to our disregard.
Language, our common enemy, moves like the tide against us,
Fortune's heel upwind
over Dogana's golden universe
High in the cloud-scratched and distant sky.
Six p.m. Sunday church bells
Flurry and circle and disappear like pigeon flocks,
Lost in the sunlight's fizzle and fall.
The stars move as well against us.
From pity, it sometimes seems.
So what's the body to do,
caught in its web of spidered flesh?
Venetian dog has figured his out, and stands his ground,
Bristled and hogbacked,
Barking in cadence at something that you and I can't see.
But
For us, what indeed, lying like S. Lorenzo late at night
On his brazier, lit from above by a hole in the sky,
From below by coals,
his arm thrown up,
In Titian's great altarpiece, in supplication, what indeed?
In the Valley of the Magra
In June, above Pontrèmoli, high in the Lunigiana,
The pollen-colored chestnut blooms
sweep like a long cloth
Snapped open over the bunched treetops
And up the mountain as far as the almost-Alpine meadows.
At dusk, in the half-light, they appear
Like stars come through the roots of the great trees from another sky.
Or tears, with my glasses off.
Sometimes they seem like that
Just as the light fades and the darkness darkens for good.
Or that's the way I remember it when the afternoon thunderstorms
Tumble out of the Blue Ridge,
And distant bombardments muscle in
across the line
Like God's solitude or God's shadow,
The loose consistency of mortar and river stone
Under my fingers where I leaned out
Over it all,
isolate farm lights
Starting to take the color on, the way I remember it ...
Returned to the Yaak Cabin, I Overhear an Old Greek Song
Back at the west window, Basin Creek
Stumbling its mantra out in a slurred, midsummer monotone,
Sunshine in planes and clean sheets
Over the yarrow and lodgepole pine —
We spend our whole lives in the same place and never leave,
Pine squirrels and butterflies at work in a deep dither,
Bumblebee likewise, wind with a slight hitch in its get-along.
Dead heads on the lilac bush, daisies
Long-legged forest of stalks in a white throw across the field
Above the ford and deer path,
Candor of marble, candor of bone —
We spend our whole lives in the same place and never leave,
The head of Orpheus bobbing in the slatch, his song
Still beckoning from his still-bloody lips, bright as a bee's heart.
Ars Poetica II
I find, after all these years, I am a believer —
I believe what the thunder and lightning have to say;
I believe that dreams are real,
and that death has two reprisals;
I believe that dead leaves and black water fill my heart.
I shall die like a cloud, beautiful, white, full of nothingness.
The night sky is an ideogram,
a code card punched with holes.
It thinks it's the word of what's-to-come.
It thinks this, but it's only The Library of Last Resort,
The reflected light of The Great Misunderstanding.
God is the fire my feet are held to.
Cicada Blue
I wonder what Spanish poets would say about this,
Bloodless, mid-August meridian,
Afternoon like a sucked-out, transparent insect shell,
Diffused, and tough to the touch.
Something about a labial, probably,
something about the blue.
St. John of the Cross, say, or St. Teresa of Avila.
Or even St. Thomas Aquinas,
Who said, according to some,
"All I have written seems like straw
Compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me."
Not Spanish, but close enough,
something about the blue.
Blue, I love you, blue, one of them said once in a different color,
The edged and endless
Expanse of nowhere and nothingness
hemmed as a handkerchief from here,
Cicada shell of hard light
Just under it, blue, I love you, blue ...
We've tried to press God in our hearts the way we'd press a leaf in a book,
Afternoon memoried now,
sepia into brown,
Night coming on with its white snails and its ghost of the Spanish poet,
Poet of shadows and death.
Let's press him firm in our hearts, O blue, I love you, blue.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Appalachia by Charles Wright. Copyright © 1998 Charles Wright. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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