Zone Journals by Charles Wright

a prayer book, flushed from my own body,
China black, lapping the porcelain:
somewhere inside me blood
Is drawing the darkness in,
Stipple by stipple into the darker waters beneath the self.
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    I have no interest in anything
but the color of breath,
Green as the meat-haunted hum of flies,
Viridian exocrine,
wisp of the wave-urge, jade
Calvary of the begotten sigh,
Alpha of everything, green needle and green syringe.
    â€” 11 November 1985
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    â€”“If you licked my heart, you’d die,
poisoned by gall and anxiousness.”
I read that last night in my first dream.
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    In the next, the leaves fell from the trees,
the stars fell from the sky
Like snowflakes, slowly and vast:

    As I walked through the lightfall, my footprints like small, even
voids
Behind me,
the color of starflakes settling on everything,
Light up to my ankles, then up to my knees,
I moved effortlessly through the splendor drifting around me
Until I became a dot,
then grained out into light,
The voids of my footprints still sunk, hard-edged and firm, where
I’d passed.
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    In my last dream, just before sunrise,
I showed slides, two slides at a time,
of the Resurrection, one
A painting, the other a photograph.
Much later, I showed the Five Sorrows of the Virgin,
One at a time,
three prayers of intercession and the Assumption of St. John …
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    The subject matter is not the persona, it’s the person:
“If you licked my heart, you’d die,
poisoned by gall and anxiousness.”
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    Today, in mid-November’s ocher afternoon light,
All’s otherworldly,
my neighbor rolling his garbage carts to the curb,
My son repacking the tulip bulbs in their black beds:
What stays important is what we don’t know and what we are not,
For nothing and nothing make nothing.
    â€” 20 November 1985
    â€”All my life I’ve stood in desire:
look upon me and leave me alone,
Clear my windows and doors of flies
And let them be, taking no heed of them: I abide
In darkness,
it is so small and indivisible,
A full food, and more precious than time:
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    Better to choose for your love what you can’t think,
better
To love what may be gotten and held,
And step above what can be cast out and covered up:
The shorter the word, the more it serves the work of the spirit:
Tread it down fast,
have it all whole, not broken and not undone.
    â€” 28 November 1985
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    â€”Last day of November, rain
Stringy and almost solid,
incessantly gathering darkness around it
At one in the afternoon across
the Long Island of the Holston:
Up-island, steam from the coal gasification plant
Of Tennessee Eastman Corporation melds
With the cloud cover and rain cover
halfway up Bays Mountain—
Sycamore trees, with their mace-like and tiny pendants
And chimes, bow out toward the south sluice of the South Fork
Where I stand, a twentieth century man on ground
Holy for over ten thousand years:

    Across the river, the burial sites
have been bulldozed and slash-stacked
Next to Smith Equipment Company;
Behind me, the chain-linked and barbed-wire fence
Cuts under the power pylon
from one side of the island to the other,
Enclosing the soccer fields;
Rain is continuous as I turn
From the gray, cataracted eye
of a television set
Caught in a junk-jam of timber and plastic against the bank,
And walk back to the footbridge
I’d crossed the river on an hour and a half before:
Next to it, off to the left,
A rectangular block of marble, backed by slab-stone,
Had been inscribed:
Long Island of the Holston
Sacred Cherokee Ground Relinquished by Treaty
Jan. 7, 1806.
3.61 Acres Returned
To the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians by
The City of Kingsport on July 16, 1976:
Wolf Clan, Blue Clan, Deer Clan, Paint Clan, Wild Potato Clan,
Long Hair Clan, Bird Clan:
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    Steam stacks, sycamores, brush harbor,
rain like the river falling …
    â€” 5 December 1985
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    â€”Late afternoon, blue of the sky blue
As a dove’s neck, dove
Color of winter