Zone Journals by Charles Wright Page B

inexactitude
Is not what we think we see.
How does one say these things?
The sheathed beaks of the waxed magnolia
Utter their couched syllables,
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    Shhh of noon wind mouthing the last word.
Deep in the crevices and silk ravines of the snow rose,

Under the purple beards at the lily’s throat,
silence stocks its cocoon:
Inside, in its radiance,
the right answer waits to be born.
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    Truthful words are not beautiful,
beautiful words not truthful,
Lao-tzu says. He has a point.
Nor are good words persuasive:
The way of heaven can do no real harm,
and it doesn’t contend.
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    Beginning of June, clouds like medieval banderoles
Out of the sky’s mouth
back toward the east,
Explaining the painting as Cimabue once did
In Pisa, in tempera,
angels sending the message out
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    In those days. Not now, down here
Where the peaches swell like thumbs, and the little apples and
pears
Buzz like unbroken codes on the sun’s wire,
their secret shoptalk
The outtakes we would be privy to,
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    But never are, no matter how hard we look at them or listen.
Still, it’s here in its gilt script,
or there, speaking in tongues.
One of the nondescript brown-headed black birds that yawp

And scramble in and out of the trees
latches me with his lean eye
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    And tells me I’m wasting my time,
something I’m getting used to
In my one life with its one regret
I keep on trundling here
in order to alter it.
You’re wasting your time, he tells me again. And I am.
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    It is not possible to read the then in the now.
It is not possible to see the blood in the needle’s eye,
Sky like a sheet of carbon paper
repeating our poor ills
On the other side.
We must be good to each other.
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    Like a developing photograph,
the dawn hillsides appear
Black-and-white then green then rack-over into color
Down-country along the line,
House and barn as the night blanks
away into morning’s fixer …
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    Like dreams awaiting their dreamers, cloud-figures step forth
Then disappear in the sky, ridge lines are cut,
grass moans
Under the sun’s touch and drag:
With a sigh the day explains itself, and reliefs into place …

Like light bulbs, the pears turn on,
birds plink, the cow skull spins and stares
In heaven’s eye, sunshine
Cheesecloths the ground beside the peach trees.
The dragon maple shivers its dry sides …
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    I put down these memorandums of my affections,
As John Clare said,
memory through a secondary
Being the soul of time
and life the principal but its shadow,
July in its second skin glistering through the trees …
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    For the Heavenly Father desires that we should see,
Ruysbroeck has told us,
and that is why
He’s ever saying to our innermost spirit one deep
Unfathomable word,
and nothing else …
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    Thus stone upon stone,
And circle on circle I raised eternally:
So step after step
I drew back in sure ascension to Paradise,
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    Someone once wrote about Brunelleschi—
Giovanbattista Strozzi,
Vasari says—when he died

Vaulting the double dome of S. Maria del Fiore
In Florence,
which everyone said was impossible.
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    Paolo Uccello, on the other hand, once drew
The four elements as animals:
a mole for earth,
A fish for water, a salamander for fire, and for air
A chameleon which lives on air
and thus will assume whatever color.
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    In his last days, secluded inside his house, he stayed up
All night in his study, his wife said,
intent on perspective.
O what a lovely thing perspective is, he’d call out.
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    August thrusts down its flushed face,
disvectored at the horizon.
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    How is the vanishing point
when you look at it hard?
How does it lie in the diamond zones?
What are the colors of disappearance,
pink and gray,
Diamond and pink and gray?
How are they hard to look at?
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    September’s the month that moves us
out of our instinct:

As the master said:
for knowledge, add something