C.D. Wright (The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, 2016)
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C.D. Wright (The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, 2016)
more favourite poems
ron padgett collected poems: "how long"
donald justice collected poems: "there is a gold light in certain old paintings..."
rita ann higgins witches in the bushes: “be someone”
frank lima incidents of travel in poetry
campbell mcgrath nox borealis
ha jin a distant center: "all you have is a country"
jack underwood war the war
kit schluter pierrot's fingernails: "bad faith"
angela mao theme and variations on ai weiwei's "dropping a han dynasty urn"
lilly bechtel the shape of grief
simon shieh act i
c.d. wright steal away: new and selected poems: "everything good between men and women"
stephen dobyns name-burning
dan vera speaking wiri wiri: “small shame blues”
hannah srajey the lamppost glows orange in the daytime
deborah landau the uses of the body: "september"
kofi
What Keeps
We live on a hillside close to water We eat in darkness We sleep in the coldest part of the house We love in silence We keep poetry locked in a glass cabinet Some nights We stay up passing it back and forth between us drinking deep
- C.D. Wright, from One with Others
You have your life until you use it. You forfeit the only life you know or go to your grave with the song curled inside you.
C.D. Wright
PETITION FOR REPLENISHMENT
We do not mean to complain. We know how it is. In older, even sadder cultures the worst possible sorts have been playing hot and cold with people’s lives for much longer. Like Perrow says, We’ll all have baboon hearts one of these days. We wintered with ample fuel and real tomatoes. We were allowed to roam, sniffing and chewing at the tufted crust. We were let to breathe. That is, we respirated. Now the soft clocks have gorged themselves on our time. Yet as our hair blanches and comes out in hanks, we can tell it is nearly spring— the students shed their black coats on the green; we begin to see shade. Lo, this is the breastbone’s embraceable light. We are here. Still breathing and constellated.
C.D. WRIGHT
MORNING STAR
This isn’t the end. It simply cannot be the end. It is a road. You go ahead coatless, light-soaked, more rutilant than the road. The soles of your shoes sparkle. You walk softly as you move further inside your subject. It is a living season. The trees are anxious to be included. The car with fins beams through countless oncoming points of rage and need. The sloughed-off cells under our bed form little hills of dead matter. If the most sidereal drink is pain, the most soothing clock is music. A poetry of shine could come of this. It will be predominantly green. You will be allowed to color in as much as you want for green is good for the teeth and eyes. (‘Morning Star’ by C.D. Wright, 1949-2016)
Anon, this sent shivers down my spine. Thank you.
Poem Missing Someone by C, D, Wright
shielding her eyes from the sun with her free hand stabbed by the sudden thought of him standing on the rim of some pond wind washing the beans out of his dish teaching a dog to retrieve in water living within himself one lost valley
“I heard Heather McHugh tell an ample audience, there are two points at which poetry is indispensable to people—at the point of love and the point of death.”
—C. D. Wright