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Over the hill, the river's glib.
                                         In multiple tongues,
It's got a line of talk for anyone who wants it.
Lonely summer morning. Dwarf willows,
Black corners, a safe shadow for anyone who wants it.

What the river says isn't enough.
The scars of unknowing are on our cheeks,
                                                              those blank pages.
I'll let the wind speak my piece.
I'll let the Vocalissimo lay me down,
                                                      and no one else.

                                                ....................

There is out here, on summer mornings, a kind of light,
                                                                                silky and rare,
That drapes through the evergreens
Every so often when clouds from the northwest glacier across
The sun and disintegrate.

A light like the absence of light it is so feral and shy.
A pentimento, even.
It is as though it dreamed us out of its solitude.
It is as though we're glazed here,
                                                 unasked for, unremembering.

                                                 ....................

It's Monday back there in the land of the Chickasaws.
The white clouds stumble upon each other, and pile up
Like mountains of faithlessness,
As clouds will, on a summer morning,
                                                       forgetting nothing, as clouds do.

Bright Monday. Unbearable light in the evergreens.
Dark river beneath it,
                               threading the eye of the underworld.
Above, on the great current of air,
The clouds drift on to their appointed stations, as clouds will do.

                                                ....................

Odor of propane, nervous rustling of aspen leaves,
Summer morning unravelling silently through the woods.
The long body of the Hunter Gracchus sails by on its black water.
Late, golden July.

Time, like a swallow's shadow cutting across the grass,
Faint, darker, then faint again,
Imprints our ecstasy, and scores us.
And time will finish this, not I, and write it out,
                                                                   as only time can—

                                               ....................

The river rises in the mind, but empties nowhere,
Its hair naked in naked branches.
Spiders swing through my heart,
                                               the moons of Jupiter turn and shine,
The river slides on its flaming wheel

And sings on summer mornings,
                                              as though to croon itself to sleep.
And mumbles a kind of nothingness,
River that flows everywhere, north and south, like the wind
And never closes its eye.

                                               ....................

Cloud skiff, like early snowfall, on the move from the west
Over Mt. Henry and my shoulder.
St. Pablo, patron of horses, appears through his wounds.
Hoofprints in khaki-colored dust.
                                                 Horseman salve our sins.

Summer morning. Gun-grey sky.
Rust keeps nibbling away at the edges of our lives.
Under the roots of the pine trees,
                                                under the thunder,
Lightning is tracking our footprints, one leg at a time.

                                             ....................

Bird life. An unappeasable bird life.
Saint's flesh melting into the flames below the brazier.
Sky flat and blank as parchment,
Wordless, encrypted blue,
                                       God's endgame, summer morning.

The secret language of butterflies.
The short shadows of those
                                         who will not rise from the dead.
The broken dream-cries of angels half-dazed in the woods.
The adjective and the noun.

CHARLES WRIGHT's new book, A Short History of the Shadow (FSG 2002), was just released in April. Charles Wright received the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music; the Academy of American Poets' Award of Merit medal in 1992, and its Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1995 for Chickamauga; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 1993; and the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 for Black Zodiac.   Mr. Wright teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

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