Lives of The Artists - Charles Wright

4

Jaundicing down from their purity, the plum blossoms

Snowfall out of the two trees

And spread like a sheet of mayflies

                                soundlessly, thick underfoot -

I am the silence that is incomprehensible,

First snow stars drifting from the sky,

                                late fall in the other world;

I am the utterance of my name.



Belief in transcendence,

                         belief in something beyond belief,

Is what the blossoms solidify

In their fall through the two worlds -

The imagining of the invisible, the slow dream of metaphor,

Sanction our going up and our going down, our days

And the lives we infold inside them,

                                    our yes and yes.



Good to get that said, tongue of cold air

Licking the landscape,

                        Snuffing the flame in the green fuse.

I am the speech that cannot be grasped.

I am the substance and the thing that has no substance,

Cast forth upon the face of the earth,

Whose margins we write in,

                  whose one story we tell, and keep on telling.

-Charles Wright, Black Zodiac