I first discovered Charles Wright in the late 1990s, after he won a Pulitzer Prize. I confess I find him a difficult and challenging poet - but this one of his I love, for all my usual reasons for loving poems. Once again, the poet finds comfort, of a kind, in the natural world, while still embracing the human burden:
Envoi
What we once liked, we no longer like.
What we used to delight in settles like fine ash on our tongues.
What we once embraced embraces us.
Things have destinies, of course,
on-lines and downloads mysterious as the language of clouds.
My life has become like that,
Half uninterpretable, half new geography,
Landscapes stilled and adumbrated, memory unratcheting,
Its voice-over not my own.
Meanwhile, the mole goes on with its subterranean daydreams,
The dogs lie around like rugs,
Birds nitpick their pinfeathers, insects slick down their shells.
No horizon-honing here, no angst in the anthill.
What happens is what happens,
And what happened to happen never existed to start with.
Still, who wants a life like that,
No next and no before, no yesterday, no today,
Tomorrow a moment no one will ever live in?
As for me, I’ll take whatever wanes,
The loosening traffic on the straightaway, the dark and such,
The wandering stars, wherever they come from now, wherever
they go.
I’ll take whatever breaks down beneath its own sad weight-
The paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder, for instance,
Language, the weather, the word of God.
I’ll take as icon and testament
The daytime metaphysics of the natural world,
Sun on tie post, rock on rock.
I like the whole thing, but this bit is my favorite:
My life has become like that,
Half uninterpretable, half new geography…
In a way I can’t fully articulate, I know what he means…
One of my favorite poems talk about women’s lives and bodies as geography. I want to say it was written by Clifton, but I’ll have to double-check.
“Geography” is such a good metaphor for so many things that require careful navigation.