Otherness inside Us

“Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.
Moon-fingers lay down their same routine
On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.
Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.

I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.

And the wind says “What?” to me.
And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me.
And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.
And the gears notch and the engines wheel.”
― Charles Wright

“There is an otherness inside us
We never touch,
no matter how far down our hands reach.
It is the past,
with its good looks and Anytime, Anywhere ...
Our prayers go out to it, our arms go out to it
Year after year,
But who can ever remember enough?”
― Charles Wright, The Southern Cross

“A moment that should have lasted forever and forever
Long over—
it came and went before I knew it existed.
I think I know what it means,
But every time I start to explain it, I forget the words.”
― Charles Wright, A Short History of the Shadow: Poems

“...may we not be strangers in the lush province of joy”
― Charles Wright

“The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.”
― Charles Wright

“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