Chickamauga

by Charles Wright

Dove-twirl in the tall grass.
                                             End-of-summer glaze next door
On the gloves and split ends of the conked magnolia tree.
Work sounds: truck back-up-beep, wood tin-hammer, cicada, fire horn.

                                    _____

History handles our past like spoiled fruit.
Mid-morning, late-century light
                                                    calicoed under the peach trees.
Fingers us here. Fingers us here and here.

                                    _____

The poem is a code with no message:
The point of the mask is not the mask but the face underneath,
Absolute, incommunicado,
                                            unhoused and peregrine.

                                    _____

The gill net of history will pluck us soon enough
From the cold waters of self-contentment we drift in
One by one
                    into its suffocating light and air.

                                    _____

Structure becomes an element of belief, syntax
And grammar a catechist,
Their words what the beads say,
                                                     words thumbed to our discontent.

                                                                                                                                      from Chickamauga (FSG )
                                                                                                              Collected in Negative Blue (FSG 2000).
                                                                                                                Reprinted by permission of the author.

Charles Wright was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee in 1935. He spent his youth and early adulthood in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. He graduated with a B.A. from Davidson College in 1957, then joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in Verona, Italy from 1957-61. After his time of service, Wright earned an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa in 1963, then was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Rome, 1963-65, as well as a Fulbright Lectureship at the University of Padua, 1968-69. He has taught at the University of California at Irvine and now teaches at the University of Virginia. Wright has published fourteen volumes of poetry as well as translations of Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Dino Campana. He has also produced two collections of nonfictional essays and interviews, Halflife (1988) and Quarter Notes (1995). His stature as one of the most compelling voices at work in contemporary American poetry is evident in his numerous prestigious awards for his verse, including a PEN Translation Prize in 1979, an Ingram Merrill Fellowship in 1980, a Lenore Marshall Prize for Chickamauga (1995), a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award for Black Zodiac (1997), and an Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.