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The folding door Of a listing phone booth Across the drawbridge A store called Her Hands A club called His Room An out-of-date flier for A free seminar for the heart Angelica is rampant Egrets flock the treetops The day wears itself away Against the barbed fencing A barge goes quietly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, coppercanyonpress.org. 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. | 
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