CHARLES WRIGHT
"Silent Journal"

Inaudible consonant inaudible vowel
The word continues to fall
                                            in splendor around us
Window half shadow window half moon
                                                 back yard like a book of snow
That holds nothing and that nothing holds
Immaculate text
                          not too prescient not too true

CHARLES WRIGHT
"Time Is a Graceless Enemy, but Purls as It Comes and Goes"

I’m winding down. The daylight is winding down.
Only the night is wound up tight.
And ticking with unpaused breath.
Sweet night, sweet steady, reliable, uncomplicated night.

September moon, two days from full,
slots up from the shouldered hill.
There is no sound as the moon slots up, no thorns in its body.
Invisible, the black gondola floats
through down-lid and drowning stars.

CHARLES WRIGHT - “Yard Work”

I think that someone will remember us in another time,
Sappho once said—more or less—
Her words caught
Between the tongue’s tip and the first edge of the invisible.

I hope so, myself now caught
Between the edge of the landscape and the absolute,
Which is the same place, and the same sound,
That she made.

Meanwhile, let’s stick to business.
Everything else does, the landscape, the absolute, the invisible.
My job is yard work—
I take this inchworm, for instance, and move it from here to there.