## __ShallCross__
We are walking along a curve
Observed by the hawk
Completing the arc
For us but not by us
Responding to the gravity
Of the bend as we climb
Toward a jagged ridge
Pages fluttered by the softest
Wind as wind slips through
The folding door
Of a listing phone booth
Across the drawbridge
A store called Her Hands
A club called His Room
An out-of-date flier for
A free seminar for the heart
Angelica is rampant
Egrets flock the treetops
The day wears itself away
Against the barbed fencing
A barge goes quietly off course
Cars are sparser now
Crows are everywhere
Getting bigger louder closer
In a well-kept farmhouse
A lid slams down
On a pounded piano
As the words sink into me
You are still young enough
To adopt a xolo
Write an opera on glass
Bed a chimera
Bedazzle and be devoured
The moonroof in your head
Slowly sliding open
To the scent of oleander
The bad gushing out of you
Things in plain sight things hidden
It doesn’t make any difference
If I could buffer my fall
Not with my body but my breath
Maybe stay awake for
The appearance of a small angel
Clear frozen beautiful
Like someone from Chicago
Living ocular proof
Of an immense force swooping
Swiftly downward to cool
The coils within coils
Having missed the free seminar
By several decades now
Even the namer of clouds is gone
So whatever I thought
Was tender or true
Left my face a network
Of hatchmarks from a mother
Lost in the exclusion zone
Father felled from the feet up
Son whose brown eyes
Are both sharper and softer
Than either of ours
An impossible child
No one could break or resist
Who has begun to beat his own
Diamondback path
To the edge of his fields
To the edge of his life
As the big clouds are rolling in
I try to herd the worst feelings
I ever felt the worst thoughts
The very worst under one
Warped sheet of metal
A nonbeliever dropped to
A pair of knobby knees
Every other thing reminds me
Of you even a tempera
By a seven-year-old
From Down Under titled
The Driver Sits in the Shade
But What About the Horse
It was something you might
Have said to a family waiting
For a taxi to the historic district
Or a gondola to take them
Off the mountain
Even a milk glass
Of field flowers sensed
You entering the room
Before you dropped me off
On a Lower East Side curb
With my rolling bags of grief
And pretty sheer brassieres
It’s starting to seem as if everyone
Were already dead
And looking for my glasses
While Vic plunks out Buckets
Of Rain to a smoke-soaked
Roadhouse of rubes
My disappointment sits
Under the Tree of Disappointment
In a dirty skirt in a ruff
Of dirt the color of dirt
If a hand and it could be my hand
Moves over the bark it touches
Where an arrow passed through the trunk
The mind wills it into reverse
That the shaft of the arrow glide
Soundlessly backward
And the hand it could be your hand
Soothes the welt left by its entry
The air turns the blue of a seldom worn
Dress left in a closet by the woman
Who opened a notebook
To what must have been your hand
It looked like your striking
Script of course it was your hand
That wrote she doesn’t get it
I was never there
Of my own volition
I would have never asked
The grass is strong unlike her
The water unperturbedly furled
The Ladder Tree leans toward me
And then swings out of reach
The ache that will last the rest
Of our lives stiffens into those words
The Tree of Knowledge
Tries to draw off the poison
Without destroying itself
Now who will make the record of us
Who will be the author
Of our blind and bilious hours
Of the silken ear of our years
Who will distinguish our dandruff
From the rest among the gusts of history
Who will turn our maudlin concerns
Into moments of incandescence
Who remember when I was a dirty blond
That hung like a mare’s mane
A blond with an even dirtier mouth
And a pent-up anatomy
Your shoe trailing on the ground
Moving gracefully round me
Trying to stir up the hardpan
So thirsty and hot
Who fill us with the tingle
Of animation and of wonder
Who be there glistening
With sweat and forgiveness
Once the stall has been mucked
And re-mucked
The Tree That Owns Itself appears
Sickly but still blossoms
In Vic’s hometown along with
The eight feet of earth round it
Which is not enough
Sedated to hopefully endure
The dozers and cranes
When the word turbine wanes
I can hear a bee entering a quince
A shoot of bamboo piercing
The skin of the earth
A black ant climbing a stem
The sound of raw umber
Distinct from burnt
The sound of still water
The sound of a towel
Drifting to the ground
The sound of you rubbing
Oil on someone else’s limbs
It is so patently stupid to stick
By a one-stoplight-town dream
To love and be loved to the end
Without ruth or recrimination
Como una estúpida pelicula
We saw at an outdoor theater
In Guerrero standing up
From previews to credits
In a warm downpour
Then I see the quivery
Shadow of my stricken self
Left on a traffic island
At the noisiest intersection
In Buenos Aires
Drowning in the decibels
I don’t want you to count
The conks on my trunk
Under the Tree of Conjugal Love
How this feels to be diminished
By one the one mistaken
For the one who would usher
Us away from the Tree
Of Failure and Shame
Beyond the Tree of Deceit
Unfulfillment and Illusion
Into the limbic woods
Of subtle adults-only stuff
Long-playing side-lit up-flickering
Beyond the Tree of Childish Wishes
Past the Tree of Ten Thousand Mistakes
I’m sure there is a word
In English there is always a word
What is that low-flying short-winged bird
Your mother would know
Even if she can’t call up its name
They fly alone notwithstanding
They are abundant
But they fly only the breadth of a field
Traveling silently
It is early yet you said I’m going back to my study
A hand reaching toward your half-turned head
Pale sun filtering through the cloud floor
Passing over a tangle of tensions and angularities
A silver band suddenly visible in the grass
The perennials by the shed identifying
Themselves by vibration alone
The light discolored as candelabrum
From a preceding life your Junoesque
Hand turning the handle to a door carved
From a Tree of Tomorrows
Don’t shut it I said We lack for nothing
Indissolubly connected
Across the lines of our lives
The once the now the then and again
*From* ShallCross. *Copyright © 2016 by C. D. Wright. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, (1).*
*C.D. Wright grew up in Arkansas and lived in Rhode Island and California. She is the author of over a dozen collections of poetry and prose and is a recipient of numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Griffin International Prize, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Her previous book is* The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All. *C.D. Wright unexpectedly passed away in her sleep on January 12, 2016.*
1) (https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/index.asp)
