Tennessee Line

by Charles Wright

Afternoon overcast the color of water
                                                             smoothed by clouds
That whiten where they enter the near end of the sky.
First day of my fifty-fifth year,
Last week of August limp as a frayed rope in the trees,
Yesterday’s noise a yellow dust in my shirt pocket
Beneath the toothpick,
                                     the .22 bullet and Amitone.

Sounds drift through the haze,
The shadowless orchard, peach leaves dull in the tall grass,
No wind, no bird shudder.
Green boat on the red Rivanna.
                                                   Rabbit suddenly in place
By the plum tree, then gone in three bounds.
Downshift of truck gears.

                                    _____

In 1958, in Monterey, California,
I wrote a journal of over one hundred pages
About the Tennessee line,
About my imagined unhappiness,
                                                       and how the sun set like a coffin
Into the gray Pacific.
How common it all was.
                                        How uncommon I pictured myself.

Memento scrivi, skull-like and word-drunk,
                                                               one hundred fourteen pages
Of inarticulate self-pity
Looking at landscape and my moral place within it,
The slurry of words inexorable and dark,
The ethical high ground inexorable and dark
I droned from
                       hoping for prescience and a shibboleth . . .

                                    _____

I remember the word and forget the word
                                                                   although the word
Hovers in flame around me.
Summer hovers in flame around me.
The overcast breaks like a bone above the Blue Ridge.
A loneliness west of solitude
Splinters into the landscape
                                             uncomforting as Braille.

We are our final vocabulary,
                                               and how we use it.
There is no secret contingency.
There’s only the rearrangement, the redescription
Of little and mortal things.
There’s only this single body, this tiny garment
Gathering the past against itself,
                                                     making it otherwise.

                                                                                                                                    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.