Quotes from Charles Wright

All those nights looking up at the sky, wanting to be there, away from the grief of being here.

We disappear as stars do, soundless, without a trace.

Let go, live your life, the grave has no sunny corners

I used to think the power of words was inexhaustible, That how we said the world was how it was, and how it would be, I used to imagine that word-sway and word thunder Would silence the Silence and all that, That words were the Word, That language could lead us inexplicably to grace, As though it were geographical. I used to think these things when I was young. I still do.

Narrow road, wide road, all of us on it, unhappy, Unsettled, seven yards short of immortality And a yard short of not long to live. Better to sit down in the tall grass and watch the clouds, To lift our faces up to the sky, Considering—for most of us—our lives have been a constant mistake.

THINGS HAVE ENDS AND BEGINNINGS" Cloud mountains rise over mountain range. Silence and quietness,                             sky bright as water, sky bright as lake water. Grace is the instinct for knowing when to stop. And where.

He looked like an angelic little boy who had been kicked out of his orphanage for failing to take part in group masturbation.

Meanwhile, the mole goes on with its subterranean daydreams, The dogs lie around like rugs

I write your name for the last time in this mist, White breath on the windowpane, And watch it vanish. No, it stays there.

That I isn't I anymore. It's someone else, the character who plays me, someone who's a better actor than I could ever be. I'm just the writer. Someone else is starring in my part. I remember him just well enough to try to write about him. A case of the negative sublime. I guess art's always after the fact. The real is imaginary, or imagined. Reconstitution, reconstruction, representation is all we're left with. Autobiography becomes biography in the end.

Friday beneath the sky, its little postcards of melancholy Outside each window, the engines inside the roses at half speed, The huge page of the sea with its one word despair, Fuchsia blossoms littered across the deck, Unblotted tide pools of darkness beneath the ferns … And still I go on looking, match after match in the black air.

A cicada whines, his voice Starting to drown through the rainy world, No ripple of wind, no sound but his song of black wings, No song but the song of his black wings. Such emptiness at the heart, such emptiness at the heart of being

What we are given in dreams we write as blue paint, Or messages to the clouds. At evening we wait for the rain to fall and the sky to clear. Our words are words for the clay, uttered in undertones, Our gestures salve for the wind. We sit out on the earth and stretch our limbs, Hoarding the little mounds of sorrow laid up in our hearts. —Charles Wright, closing lines to "Homage to Paul Cézanne," The Southern Cross: Poems (Random House, 1981)

If you don't shine you are darkness. from "Tomorrow

Out of any two thoughts I have, one is devoted to death.

Lonesomeness. Morandi, Cezanne, it's all about lonesomeness. And Rothko. Especially Rothko.

When what you write about is what you see, what do you write about when it's dark? from "32

Spider Crystal Ascension" The spider, juiced crystal and Milky Way, drifts on his web through the night sky And looks down, waiting for us to ascend … At dawn he is still there, invisible, short of breath, mending his net. All morning we look for the white face to rise from the lake like a tiny star. And when it does, we lie back in our watery hair and rock.

Out of any two thoughts I have, one is devoted to death. Our days an uncertainty, a chaos and shapeless, all that our lives are blurs down, like a landscape reflected in water.

Sitting at Night on the Front Porch" I'm here, on the dark porch, restyled in my mother's chair. 10:45 and no moon. Below the house, car lights Swing down, on the canyon floor, to the sea. In this they resemble us, Dropping like match flames through the great void Under our feet. In this they resemble her, burning and disappearing. Everyone's gone And I'm here, sizing the dark, saving my mother's seat.

Memory is a cemetery I've visited once or twice

If you want great tranquility/ It's hard work and a long walk