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  • Dude
  • Charles Wright (bio)

In my mind's eye I always seeThe closed door to eternity.I think I'll take it,                         and then I start to think I won't.As though I had a choice in the matter.As though the other side of it                              was something inexorable, something fluxed.As though the though would never exist.

The dog gets sick. The dog runs away.You've got your mind on transubstantiation.                                                                   The dogRuns away. The dog gets sick, the son calls to tell youThat he's been fired.                                      You've got your mind on transubstantiation.The world's a mass of cold spaghetti.The dog runs away, your mind's still on transubstantiation.

The dog's gone missing, the dog comes back.The same dog, but a different dog,                                                      in different weather.

The droop-bellied dark clouds loomAnd suck up their forks of light                                                and the dog goes missing.A second time, and who can blame him?If he disappears again, your mind's back on transubstantiation.

We live beyond the metaphysician's fingertips.It's sad, dude, so sad.There is no metaphor, there is no simile,                                                           and there is no rhetoric.To nudge us to their caress.The trees remain trees, God help us. [End Page 44] And memory, for all its warmth,                                                    is merely the things we've forgot to forget.

That's it. The winds over Punta San Vigilio,Though welcome, are only winds.In front of us the door tingles.                                                           Behind us, the fingertips tingle.And here, in the back country,Junk grass grows down to the creek, the lilacs hang their heads,And our only world surrounds us like stretched skin,                                                                          and beats its drum. [End Page 45]

Charles Wright

Charles Wright won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry for Black Zodiac in 1998. He won the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music/Selected Early Poems and legions of other awards for his more than twenty poetry books. Now retired from a distinguished career at the University of Virginia, Wright grew up primarily in Oak Ridge and Kingsport in East Tennessee.

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