It's been a poetry kind of week. The new season demands adjustments in mood, in thinking, and words seem most powerful in brief. Below, two poems by Charles Wright. The first, The Last Supper, always reminds me of this time of year. The second, The Last Word, was published recently in the Kenyon Review (here).
The Last Supper
I seem to have come to the end of something, but don’t know what,
Full moon blood orange just over the top of the redbud tree.
Maundy Thursday tomorrow,
then Good Friday, then Easter in full drag,
Dogwood blossoms like little crosses
All down the street,
lilies and jonquils bowing their mitred heads.
Perhaps it’s a sentimentality about such fey things,
But I don’t think so. One knows
There is no end to the other world,
no matter where it is.
In the event, a reliquary evening for sure,
The bones in their tiny boxes, rosettes under glass.
Or maybe it’s just the way the snow fell
a couple of days ago,
So white on the white snowdrops.
As our fathers were bold to tell us,
it’s either eat or be eaten.
Spring in its starched bib,
Winter’s cutlery in its hands. Cold grace. Slice and fork.
The Last Word
I love to watch the swallows at sundown,
swarming after invisible things to eat.
Were we so lucky,
A full gullet, and never having to look at what it is,
Sunshine all over our backs.
There are no words between my fingers
Populating the lost world.
Something, it now seems, has snapped them up
Into its speechlessness,
into its thick aphasia.
It’s got to be the Unredeemable Bird, come out
From the weight of the unbearable.
It flaps like a torn raincoat,
first this side, then that side.
Words are its knot of breath,
language is what it lives on.
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