What makes us leave what we love best? What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself When we need it most, That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake And holds us flush there until we begin to love it And have to begin again? What is it within our own lives we decline to live Whenever we find it, making our days unendurable, And nights almost visionless? I still don't know yet, but I do it.

Charles Wright

Categorized in : Needs Night Sake

The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.

Charles Wright

memories

We've all led raucous lives, some of them inside, some of them out. But only the poem you leave behind is what's important. Everyone knows this. The voyage into the interior is all that matters, Whatever your ride. Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read. Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times His own weight a day just to stay alive. Now that's a life on the edge.

Charles Wright

alive important giving

How sweet the past is, no matter how wrong, or how sad.

Charles Wright

yesterday sweet past

It may not be written in any book, but it is written - You can't go back, you can't repeat the unrepeatable.

Charles Wright

repeats may book

Some people have everything

Charles Wright

want mean people

If you want great tranquility/ It's hard work and a long walk

Charles Wright

long-walks hard-work want

I empty myself with light

Charles Wright

empty light morning

Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world. Morning arrives and that's it. Sunlight darkens the earth.

Charles Wright

fire dream morning

The ache for anything is a thick dust in the heart.

Charles Wright

ache dust heart

It’s up there, and you can see the front of it. But what it is isn’t what you’re looking at. It’s behind what you’re looking at.

Charles Wright

fronts behinds

Snub end of a dismal year,

Charles Wright

stars fire dark

It's linkage I'm talking about, and harmonies and structures, And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.

Charles Wright

locks talking past

All forms of landscape are autobiographical.

Charles Wright

landscape form

Poetry is the dark side of the moon.

Charles Wright

moon dark sides

Everyone knows this.

Charles Wright

voyages interiors matter

How many times can summer turn to fall in one life?

Charles Wright

turns summer fall

How many years have slipped through our hands? At least as many as the constellations we still can identify. The quarter moon, like a light skiff,  floats out of the mist-remnants Of last night’s hard rain. It, too, will slip through our fingers  with no ripple, without us in it.

Charles Wright

moon rain night

November’s a burn and an ache.

Charles Wright

november ache