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Charles Wright Appalachian Farewell Sunset in Appalachia, bituminous bulwark Against the western skydrop. An Advent of gold and green, an Easter of ashes. If night is our last address, This is the place we moved from, Backs on fire, our futures hard-edged and sure to arrive. These are the towns our lives abandoned, Wind in our faces, The idea of incident like a box beside us on the Trailways seat. And where were we headed for? The country of Narrative, that dark territory Which spells out our stories in sentences, which gives them an end and beginning . . . Goddess of Bad Roads and Inclement Weather, take down Our names, remember us in the drip And thaw of the wintry mix, remember us when the light cools. Help us never to get above our raising, help us To hold hard to what was there, Orebank and Reedy Creek, Surgoinsville down the line. ————— Reprinted with permission of Charles Wright. Published in Scar Tissue (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006). * * * 186 Charles Wright Get a Job Just over sixteen, a cigarette-smoking boy and a bit, I spent the summer digging ditches, And carrying heavy things at Bloomingdale School site. I learned how a backhoe works, and how to handle a shovel, And multiple words not found in the dictionary. Sullivan County, Tennessee, a buck twenty an hour, 1952. Worst job of my life, but I stuck it out. Everyone else supported a family, not me. I was the high school kid, and went home Each night to my mother’s cooking. God knows where the others went. Mostly across the line into Scott County, Virginia, I think, Appalachian appendix, dead end. Slackers and multipliers, now in, now out of jail, on whom I depended. Cold grace for them. God rest them all road ever they offended, To rhyme a prominent priest. Without a ministry, without portfolio, Each morning I sought them out For their first instructions, for their laying on of hands. I wish I could say that summer changed my life, or changed theirs, But it didn’t. Apparently, nothing ever does. I did, however, leave a skin there. A bright one, I’m told, but less bright than its new brother. ————— Reprinted with permission of Charles Wright. Published in Appalachian Heritage 32.2 (Spring 2004) and reprinted in Scar Tissue (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006). * * * Charles Wright 187 Nostalgia Always it comes when we least expect it, like a wave, Or like the shadow of several waves, one after the next, Becoming singular as the face Of someone who rose and fell apart at the edge of our lives. Breaks up and re-forms, breaks up, re-forms. And all the attendant retinue of loss foams out Brilliant and sea-white, then sinks away. Memory’s dog-teeth, lovely detritus smoothed out and laid up. And always the feeling comes that it was better then, Whatever it was— people and places, the sweet taste of things— And this one, wave-borne and wave-washed, was part of all that. We take the conceit in hand, and rub it for good luck. Or rub it against the evil eye. And yet, when that wave appears, or that wave’s shadow, we like it, Or say we do, and hope the next time. We’ll be surprised again, and returned again, despite the fact The time will come, they say, when the weight of nostalgia, that ten-food spread Of sand in the heart, outweighs Whatever living existence we drop on the scales. May it never arrive, Lord, may it never arrive. ———— Reprinted with permission of Charles Wright. Published in A Short History of the Shadow: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002). 188 Charles Wright * * * What Do You Write About, Where Do Your Ideas Come From? Landscape, of course, the idea of God and language Itself, that pure grace which is invisible and sure and clear, Fall equinox two hours old, Pine cones dangling and doomed over peach tree and privet, Clouds bulbous and buzzard-traced. The Big Empty is also a subject of some note, Dark dark and never again, The missing word and there you have it, heart and heart beat. Never again and never again, Backdrop of back yard and earth and sky Jury-rigged carefully into place, Wind from the west and then some, Everything up and running hard, everything under way, Never again never again. ———— Reprinted with permission of Charles Wright. Published in Appalachia (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux...

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