Country Music: Selected Early Poems

Him

Him His sorrow hangs like a heart in the star-flowered boundary tree. It mirrors the endless wind. He feeds on the lunar differences and flies up at the dawn. When he lies down, the waters will lie down with him, And all that walks and all that stands still, and sleep through the thunder. It's for him that the willow bleeds. Look for him high in the flat black of the northern Pacific sky, Released in his suit of lights, lifted and laid clear. 156 Mingliaotse: "I would like to house my spirit within my body, to nourish my virtue by mildness, and to travel in ether by becoming a void. But I cannot do it yet. . . And so, being unable to find peace within myself, I made use of the external surroundings to calm my spirit, and being unable to find delight within my heart, I borrowed a landscape to please it. Therefore, strange were my travels." T'u Lung (T'u Ch'ihshni) Translated by Lin Yutang 157 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Charles Wright was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, in 1935 and grew up in rural Tennessee and North Carolina. He was educated at Davidson College and the Universityof Iowa and began writing his first poems while serving in the Army Intelligence Service from 1957 to 1961, stationed in Verona, Italy. He then studied in Rome as a Fulbright Scholar, translating the poems of Eugenio Muntalc and Cesare Pavese, and taught in Padua as a Fulbright Lecturer. In 1974 he received a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and in 1975 won a Guggenheim Fellowship.For seventeen years he was a member of the English department at the Universityof California, Irvine. In 1983 he became Professor of English at the University of Virginia and now lives in Charlottesville with his wife, the photographer Holly Wright. In addition to the 1983 National Book Award for Country Music, he has won the PEN Translation prize in 1979 for Eugenio Montale's The Storm and Other Things, the AcademyInstitute Award in 1977, the Academy of American Poets' Edgar Allan Poe award in 1976 for Bloodlines, and the Brandeis Creative Arts Citation for Poetry in 1987. Besides the four early books of poetry selected from here, he published another four volumes in the 1980s—The Southern Cross, The Other Side of the River, Zone Journals, and Xionia—which have been collected in the book The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wright, Charles, 1935Country music : early selected poems / Charles Wright. — 2nd ed. p. cm. ISBN 0-8195-1201 X(pbk.) I. Title. PS3573.R52C66 1991 811'.54—dc20 ~ 91-50378 ...