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Overview
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award
Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who "sounds like nobody else."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466877412 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA I How soon we come to road's end— Failure, our two-dimensional side-kick, flat dream-light, Won't jump-start or burn us in, Dogwood insidious in its constellations of part-charred cross points, Spring's via Dolorosa flashed out in a dread profusion, Nowhere to go but up, nowhere to turn, dead world-weight, They've gone and done it again, dogwood, Spring's sap-crippled, arthritic, winter-weathered, myth limb, Whose roots are my mother's hair. ——— Landscape's a lever of transcendence— jack-wedge it here, Or here, and step back, Heave, and a light, a little light, will nimbus your going forth: The dew bead, terminal bead, opens out onto a great radiance, Sun's square on magnolia leaf Offers us entrance— who among us will step forward, Camellia brown boutonnieres Under his feet, plum branches under his feet, white sky, white noon, Church bells like monk's mouths tonguing the hymn? ——— Journal and landscape —Discredited form, discredited subject matter— I tried to resuscitate both, breath and blood, making them whole again Through language, strict attention— Verona mi fe', disfecemi Verona, the song goes. I've hummed it, I've bridged the break To no avail. April. The year begins beyond words, Beyond myself and the image of myself, beyond Moon's ice and summer's thunder. All that. ——— The meat of the sacrament is invisible meat and a ghostly substance. I'll say. Like any visible thing, I'm always attracted downward, and soon to be killed and assimilated. Vessel of life, it's said, vessel of life,brought to naught, Then gathered back to what's visible. That's it, fragrance of spring like lust in the blossom-starred orchard, The shapeless shape of darkness starting to seep through and emerge, The seen world starting to tilt, Where I sit the still, unwavering point under that world's waves. ——— How like the past the clouds are, Building and disappearing along the horizon, Inflecting the mountains, laying their shadows under our feet For us to cross over on. Out of their insides fire falls, ice falls, What we remember that still remembers us, earth and air fall. Neither, however, can resurrect or redeem us, Moving, as both must, ever away toward opposite corners. Neither has been where we're going, bereft of an attitude. ——— Amethyst, crystal transparency, Maya and Pharaoh ring, Malocchio, set against witchcraft, Lightning and hailstorm, birthstone, savior from drunkenness. Purple, color of insight, clear sight, Color of memory— violet, that's for remembering, Star-crystals scattered across the penumbra, hard stars. Who can distinguish darkness from the dark, light from light, Subject matter from story line, the part from the whole When whole is part of the part and part is all of it? ——— Lonesomeness. Morandi, Cezanne, it's all about lonesomeness. And Rothko. Especially Rothko. Separation from what heals us beyond painting, beyond art. Words and paint, black notes, white notes. Music and landscape; music, landscape and sentences. Gestures for which there is no balm, no intercession. Two tone fields, horizon a line between abysses, Generally white, always speechless. Rothko could choose either one to disappear into. And did. ——— Perch'io no spero di tornar giammai, ballatetta, in Toscana, Not as we were the first time, not as we'll ever be again. Such snowflakes of memory, they fall nowhere but there. Absorbed in remembering, we cannot remember— Exile's anthem, O stiff heart, Thingless we came into the world and thingless we leave, Every important act is wordless— to slip from the right way, To fail, still accomplishes something. Even a good thing remembered, however, is not as good as not remembering at all. ——— Time is the source of all good, time the engenderer Of entropy and decay, Time the destroyer, our only-begetter and advocate. For instance, my fingernail, so pink, so amplified. In the half-clerk, for instance, These force-fed dogwood blossoms, green-leafed, defused, limp on their long branches. St. Stone, say a little prayer for me, grackles and jay in the black gum, Drowse of the poetry head, Dandelion globes luminous in the last light, more work to be done... II Something will get you, the doctor said, don't worry about that. Melancholia's got me, Pains in the abdomen, pains down the left leg and crotch. Slurry of coal dust behind the eyes, Massive weight in the musculature, dark blood, dark blood. I'm sick and tired of my own complaints, This quick flick like a compass foot through the testicle, Deep drag and hurt through the groin— Melancholia, black dog, everyone's had enough. ——— Dew-dangled, fresh-cut lawn grass will always smell like a golf course Fairway to me, Saturday morning, Chuck Ross and I Already fudging our scores down, happy as mockingbirds in deep weeds, The South Fork of the Holston River Slick as a nickel before its confluence behind our backs At Rotherwood with the North Fork's distant, blurred thunder, Our rounds in the seventies always including mulligans, Nudged lies, "found" lost balls, some extraordinary shots And that never-again-to-be-repeated teen-age false sense of attainment. ——— One summer, aged 16, I watched—each night, it seemed—my roommate, A college guy, gather his blanket up, and flashlight, And leave for his rendezvous with the camp cook— he never came back before dawn Some 40 years later I saw him again for the first time Since then, in a grocery store, in the checkout line, A cleric from Lexington, shrunken and small. Bearded even. And all these years I'd thought of him, if at all, as huge And encompassing, Not rabbit-eyed, not fumbling a half-filled brown sack, dry-lipped, apologetic. ——— In 1990 we dragged Paris —back on the gut again after 26 years— The Boulevard Montparnasse La Coupole, the Select, you know, the Dome, the Closerie de Lilas, Up and down and back and forth. Each night a Japanese girl would take a bath at 4 a.m. In the room above ours, each night someone beat his wife In a room above the garage outside our window. It rained all day for ten days. Sleeplessness, hallucination, O City of Light ... ——— What sane, impossible reason could Percy Heath have made up To talk to me, drunk, white and awe-struck, —And tone-deaf to boot— that night at the Carmel Mission? But talk he did, uncondescending, feigning interest, As Milt Jackson walked by and John Lewis walked by, Gerry Mulligan Slouched in one corner, Paul Desmond cool in an opposite one. October, 1958, Monterey Jazz Festival, First advisors starting to leave the Army Language School for South Vietnam, The Pacific's dark eyelid beginning to stir, ready to rise and roll back ... ——— During World War II, we lived in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Badges and gates, checkpoints, government housing, government rules. One house we lived in was next door to a two-star admiral. I learned a couple of things in the three-plus years we lived in Oak Ridge, One from my first (and only) paper route, the second After my first (and only) breaking-and-entering. One thing I learned, however, I didn't know what to do with: Death is into the water, life is the coming out. I still don't, though nothing else matters but that, it seems, nothing even comes close. ——— Elm Grove, Pine Valley and Cedar Hill, what detritus one remembers— The one-armed soldier we spied on making out in the sedge grass With his red-haired girl friend behind the Elm Grove playground, For instance, in 1944 ... I was nine, the fourth grade ... I remember telling Brooklyn, my best friend, my dick was stiff all night. Nine years old! My dick! All night! We talked about it for days, Oak Ridge abstracted and elswhere, —D-Day and Normandy come and gone— All eyes on the new world's sun king, its rising up and its going down. ——— It's Wednesday afternoon, and Carter and I are on the road For the Sullivan County National Bank Loan Department, 1957, Gate City and Southwest Virginia. We're after deadbeats, delinquent note payers, in Carter's words. Cemetery plots—ten dollars a month until you die or pay up. In four months I'll enter the Army, right now I'm Dr. Death, Riding shotgun for Carter, bringing more misery to the miserable. Up-hollow and down-creek, shack after unelectrified shack— The worst job in the world, and we're the two worst people in it. ——— Overeast afternoon, then weak sun, then overeast again, A little wind whiffles across the back yard like a squall line In miniature, thumping the clover heads, startling the grass. My parents' 60th wedding anniversary Were they still alive, 5th of June, 1994. It's hard to imagine, I think, your own children grown older than you ever were, I can't. I sit in one of the knock-off Brown-Jordan deck chairs we brought from California. Next to the bearded grandson my mother never saw. Some afternoon, or noon, it will all be over. Not this one.
Table of Contents
Contents
1,APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA,
2,
POEM HALF IN THE MANNER OF LI HO,
MEDITATION ON FORM AND MEASURE,
POEM ALMOST WHOLLY IN MY OWN MANNER,
MEDITATION ON SUMMER AND SHAPELESSNESS,
THE APPALACHIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD,
3,
UMBRIAN DREAMS,
OCTOBER II,
LIVES OF THE SAINTS,
CHRISTMAS EAST OF THE BLUE RIDGE,
NEGATIVES II,
LIVES OF THE ARTISTS,
DEEP MEASURE,
THINKING OF WINTER AT THE BEGINNING OF,
SUMMER,
4,
JESUIT GRAVES,
MEDITATION ON SONG AND STRUCTURE,
SITTING AT DUSK IN THE BACK YARD AFTER THE,
MONDRIAN RETROSPECTIVE,
BLACK ZODIAC,
CHINA MAIL,
5,
DISJECTA MEMBRA,
NOTES,