Free Zone Journals by Charles Wright

Yard Journal
    â€”Mist in the trees, and soiled water and grass cuttings splotch
The driveway,
afternoon starting to bulk up in the west
A couple of hours down the road:
Strange how the light hubs out and wheels
concentrically back and forth
After a rain, as though the seen world
Quavered inside a water bead
swung from a grass blade:
The past is never the past:
it lies like a long tongue
We walk down into the moist mouth of the future, where new
teeth
Nod like new stars around us,
And winds that itch us, and plague our ears,
sound curiously like the old songs.
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    â€”Deep dusk and lightning bugs
alphabetize on the east wall,
The carapace of the sky blue-ribbed and buzzing
Somehow outside it all,
Trees dissolving against the night’s job,
houses melting in air:
Somewhere out there an image is biding its time,
Burning like Abraham in the cold, swept
expanses of heaven,

Waiting to take me in and complete my equation:
What matters is abstract, and is what love is,
Candescent inside the memory,
continuous
And unexpungable, as love is …
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    â€”Blue jay’s bound like a kangaroo’s in the lawn’s high grass,
Then up in a brushstroke
and over the hedge in one arc.
Light weights down the azalea plants,
Yesterday’s cloud banks enfrescoed still
just under the sky’s cornice,
Cardinal quick transfusion into the green arm of the afternoon.
Wax-like flowers of sunlight drift
through the dwarf orchard and float
Under the pygmied peaches and pears
All over America,
and here, too, the blossoms
Continuing down from nowhere, out of the blue.
The mockingbird’s shadow is burned in the red clay below him.
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    â€”Exclusion’s the secret: what’s missing is what appears
Most visible to the eye:
the more luminous anything is,
The more it subtracts what’s around it,
Peeling away the burned skin of the world
making the unseen seen:
Body by new body they all rise into the light
Tactile and still damp,
That rhododendron and dogwood tree, that spruce,
An architecture of absence,
a landscape whose words

Are imprints, dissolving images after the eyelids close:
I take them away to keep them there—
that hedgehom, for instance, that stalk …
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    â€”A bumblebee the size of my thumb
rises like Geryon
From the hard Dantescan gloom
Under my window sash to lip the rain gutter’s tin bolgia,
Then backs out like a hummingbird
spiraling languidly out of sight,
Shoulders I’ve wanted to sit on, a ride I’ve wanted to take,
Deposited into the underlight
of cities thronged in the grass,
Fitful illuminations, iron-colored plain that lies
Littered with music and low fires,
stone edge of the pit
At the end of every road,
First faces starting to swim up:
Bico, my man, are you here?

A Journal of English Days
    (September)
    â€”Kensington Church Walk, St. Mary Abbots
Gray stone and dun through the mustard edges of chestnut leaves.
Inside, a funeral’s going on and I back off
To sit on a wooden bench
Against a brick wall
in the slick, unseasonable sunshine,
Trying to piece together
The way it must have been for someone in 1908
Fresh up from Italy,
A couple of books of his own poems in one hand
and a dead galaxy
Set to go off in crystal inside his head.
Over the stained-glass windows in front of me,
In Kensington black and white,
Ancient Lights
Is nailed to the churchside stone,
The children trailing out of the false penumbra
into the sun-screed in Indian file
Then in again, shrilling, in cadence, their little song.
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    â€”I’m back for a second look,
but someone is meditating on last week’s bench
In a full lotus. Now he touches his nose
With his right forefinger, and now
With his left.
His black shoes puddle beneath him

Like backs of mirrors he’ll walk on tenderly
Over the flat-laid churchyard gravestones when he leaves.
But now he’s back in position,
hands cupped
In his lap, thumb end touching thumb end, his eyes closed—
One of those weightless,