Reading in the Dark
Martha Ronk on C. D. Wright’s “ShallCross”
from ShallCross
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 C. D. Wright. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.
What I want to read these days is work that defies stasis and celebrates “ongoingness,” a sense of one thing following another, including the past, present, and future: “The once the now the then and again.” After tension between two people there is a pledge in The Tree of Tomorrow. Wright’s lines also demonstrate the contradictory richness of an extended moment: self-conscious attention to words we need and can frequently forget, connections to various and perhaps unexpected things and people. It is as if there were lines drawn from the opening “I” to birds, sun, perennials, hands, fields, and the important other person in the poem, “you,” and by extension all. Gentle contradictions run throughout: the birds are abundant but fly alone; the perennials are seen by means of vibration, the light is discolored as candelabrum.Unhurriedly, a seemingly natural voice speaks, easily and without artifice. Although it is a necessarily a constructed moment, it is one I want to inhabit over and over.
—Martha Ronk
Martha Ronk is the author of numerous books of poetry and is the Irma and Jay Price Professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles.
