first edge of the invisible...
Charles Wright
Yard Work
I think that someone will remember us in another time,
Sappho once said—more or less—
Her words caught
Between the tongue’s tip and the first edge of the invisible.
I hope so, myself now caught
Between the edge of the landscape and the absolute,
Which is the same place, and the same sound,
That she made.
Meanwhile, let’s stick to business.
Everything else does, the landscape, the absolute, the invisible.
My job is yard work—
I take this inchworm, for instance, and move it from here to there.
*
This poem closes Wright’s remarkable Chickamauga – leaving the reader in us (and the writer) with the small business of the writing life. This to this … from here to there. That’s the process.
No doubt … Bishop on her worst day did more than a thousand of my best days combined – but the inchworm is there.
4 comments:
The last lines of this poem please me to no end. I actually have moved an inchworm from here to there. Recently. And a caterpillar---a woolly bear, if you know what that is. And a spider trapped in the sink.
That's all I ask of a poem--the reading of it, or the writing of it:
to move me from here to there.
Thanks for posting this, Sam.
Thanks for reading, Laurel.
Wright is so precisely Zen. Am I on the mark, Sam of the ten thousand things?
Absolutely right, Clare. Thanks for the visit.
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