The Fault Of It

Some may have blamed us that we cease to speak
Of things we spoke of in our verses early,
Saying: a lovely voice is such as such;
Saying: that lady's eyes were sad last week,
Wherein the world's whole joy is born and dies;
Saying: she hath this way or that, this much
Of grace, this way or that, this much
Of grace, this little misericorde;
Ask us no further word;
If we were proud, then proud to be so wise
Ask us no more of all the things ye heard;
We may not speak of them, they touch us nearly.

-Ezra Pound

I cannot carry it.

I cannot carry it.

If I could carry it,

I would carry it . . .

-- Yoruba poem

Like Something Christenberry Pictured

                          If this were not a marked beginning, but an end or more severely, the end, and you were ready to make peace with your major failures and hidden contradictions, and you were about to start the countdown on your own long-lived-in body (and so,

                                                     a little flyover in remembrance),

                          you would seem alert enough to attend this imminent loss, sensing your own twirl in the void accelerating toward its outermost ring while your sputtering mind starts its rewind of the crud-and-gem-encrusted strata through which poetry has taken you as if some kook might jump out of the holly at any moment and extinguish you with one stroke;

                          hit pause before contact is made between your phantom assailant and your individual quote unquote soul and you are physically hied to a ramshackle building risen in full sun from uncut grass, the walls stripped of canned and dried goods and a single stick insect sticking to a tatter of color on a post struggling to support a torn roof

                                                     (like something Christenberry pictured);

                          fast-forward to glimpse last-year's-tired-of-sitting self in a coarse concrete hall, anemic palette and dais of drowsy party officials; a withered wand of a woman facing the audience, the foreigners, holding her granddaughter's hand reciting the Manas by the hundreds of lines, and the expressionless girl picking up when her infallible hand is squeezed, thus transmitting to her infallible memory the epic of her people;

                          mesmerizing until it's unbearable when you hit forward again to edge your rental car off the shoulder so you can photograph with your cell phone an alligator snapper crossing the road so poky the sixteen-wheeler that barrels over it blows the moss from its back and it freezes in position to recover from the sudden ventilation, then picks up tempo just enough to clear the truck bearing down in the opposite direction;

                                                     it tips over the edge of blacktop

                          under the unfinished garage of sky toward a section of river where nothing much is moving in a stand of cypress making a final stand against the final clearing of an exhausted land and you half expect to be chosen, to be the one to glimpse the trailing feathers of the bird no one has been able to vouch for, which is why you chose the tertiary route through empty corduroy fields the instant you stopped

                          at the crossroads, as they say, which was the very instant you stopped looking for meaning and began rifling among the folds of feeling instead where things were to be made new again, where and when the benighted and unresponsive have begun to lose their grip even on and unto the benighted and unresponsive

It is like waking up

to the old-fashioned smell of roses

it's like finding a few words

collected on the eyes

of visiting moths; like giving of your blood, generously

to live and die

as if the same occasion

having never owned a catamaran

but having cooled off in Bright Angel Creek

danced slo-mo at the Night Spot

sped through the hot air

past the second-story wedding dress stores

of San Luis Potosí

having stayed up to watch the cereus open

the last time it bloomed twelve years ago

when the boy was still a boy when

the elevator doors opened on

a once-elegant man

playing Rhapsody in Blue

on the mezzanine of a once-elegant hotel

having cruised alongside

the Big Woods at 12mph

straining to glimpse

an apparition of a wing


Ah, the flesh flashes and passes

so simple and satisfying as drinking milk

out of the carton or going from

maddeningly boring stretches (in front of a monitor)

to eating clouds (faintly lit within)

burning pages of bad poetry

stepping out of the story

(ineluctably over, fellow travelers)

here just long enough to testify

to a blinding intensity

under that big dry socket of god

the camera mounted to capture

ordinary traffic violations

fixes instead on your final face

a single frame of unadulterated

urgency is what you see, urgency it is

-- C.D. Wright