washingtonpost.com: Style Live: Books & Reading
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Like a grain of sand added to time,
Like an inch of air added to space,
or a half-inch,
We scribble our little sentences.
Some of them sound okay and some of them sound not so okay.
A grain and an inch, a grain and an inch and a half.
Sad word wands, desperate alphabet.
Still, there's no alternative
Since language fell from the sky.
Though mystics have always said that communication is languageless.
And maybe they're right
the soul speaks and the soul receives.
Small room for rebuttal there . . .
Over the Blue Ridge, late March late light annunciatory and situational.
Tonight the comet Hale-Bopp
will ghost up on the dark page of the sky
By its secret juice and design from the full moon's heat.
Good Friday's a hard rain that won't fall.
Wild onion and clump grass, green on green.
Our mouths are incapable, white violets cover the earth.
You can feel the airiness of his style in this poem, the lightness. Wright's whole book is suffused with light, also with this sadness and religious -- I think that's the longing. Reading the third volume, I began to see how much it is a journal of a certain kind of longing. And I was surprised to see how much the three books as a sequence reminded me of a poem I hadn't read in years, Tennyson's "In Memoriam," that Victorian poem of doubt and religious longing. Most of what I carried away from it was a single line about a dark night of the soul and a morning that reveals nothing: On the bald street breaks the blank day.From "Appalachia" by Charles Wright (Farrar Straus Giroux).
Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate, is the author, most recently, of the collection "Sun Under Wood."
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