Stray Paragraphs in February, Year of the Rat
by Charles Wright
East of town, the countryside unwrinkles and smooths out
Unctuously toward the tidewater and gruff Atlantic.
A love of landscape’s a true affection for regret, I’ve found,
Forever joined, forever apart,
outside us yet ourselves.
.
Renunciation, it’s hard to learn, is now our ecstasy.
However, if God were still around
he’d swallow our sighs in his nothingness.
.
The dregs of the absolute are slow sift in my blood,
Dead branches down after high winds, dead yard grass and
undergrowth—
The sure accumulation of all that’s not revealed
Rises like snow in my bare places,
cross-whipped and openmouthed.
.
Our lives can’t be lived in flames.
Our lives can’t be lit like saints’ hearts,
seared between heaven and earth.
.
February, old head-turner, cut us some slack, grind of bone
On bone, such melancholy music.
Lift up that far corner of landscape,
there, toward the west.
Let some deep light in, the arterial kind.
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