Night Journal by Charles Wright

Night Journal
Charles Wright

—I think of Issa, a man of few words:
The world of dew
Is the world of dew.
And yet . . .
And yet . . .

—Three words contain
                                                   all that we know for sure of the next life
Or the last one: Close your eyes.
Everything else is gossip,
                                                      false mirrors, trick windows
Flashing like Dutch glass
In the undiminishable sun.

—I write it down in visible ink,
Black words that disappear when held up to the light—
I write it down
                                    not to remember but to forget,
Words like thousands of pieces of shot film
                                                                                  exposed to the sun.
I never see anything but the ground.

—Everyone wants to tell his story.
The Chinese say we live in the world of the ten thousand things,
Each of the ten thousand things
                                                                 crying out to us
Precisely nothing,
A silence whose tune we’ve come to understand,
Words like birthmarks,
                                                 embolic sunsets drying behind the tongue.
If we were as eloquent,
If what we say could spread the good news the way that dogwood does,
Its votive candles
                                          phosphorous and articulate in the green haze
Of spring, surely something would hear us.

—Even a chip of beauty
                                                    is beauty intractable in the mind,
Words the color of wind
Moving across the fields there
                                                              wind-addled and wind-sprung,
Abstracted as water glints,
The fields lion-colored and rope-colored,
As in a picture of Paradise,
                                                         the bodies languishing over the sky
Trailing their dark identities
That drift off and sieve away to the nothingness
Behind them
                                  moving across the fields there
As words move, slowly, trailing their dark identities.

—Our words, like blown kisses, are swallowed by ghosts
Along the way,
                                      their destinations bereft
In a rub of brightness unending:
How distant everything always is,
                                                                    and yet how close,
Music starting to rise like smoke from under the trees.

—Birds sing an atonal row
                                                          unsyncopated
From tree to tree,
                                          dew chants
Whose songs have no words
                                                             from tree to tree
When night puts her dark lens in,
One on this limb, two others back there.

—Words, like all things, are caught in their finitude.
They start here, they finish here
No matter how high they rise—
                                                                 my judgment is that I know this
And never love anything hard enough
That would stamp me
                                                 and sink me suddenly into bliss.

SELECTED BY CHRISTOPHER CITRO

As a young poet at Ohio University in the early 1990s, I fell in love with the poetry of Charles Wright. He visited our school and gave a masterclass to us undergraduates, in which he was kind and generous and said things about poetry that blew my little mind back then and still do.

I have read his poems with love and admiration for decades, and they have been very influential to me in my own writing.

This poem, “Night Journal,” is–without exaggeration–my favorite poem ever written. It’s about language, it’s about words, the limitations of language and the great beauty and power of language even with its limitations. It’s as beautiful me today as it was back then, after thousands of readings and having memorized huge chunks of it.

Every spring, if we pass a dogwood tree in blossom, my partner or I will turn to one another a recite the lines that end the fourth stanza.

This poem has been a strong beating heart for me for so long. And I’ll continue to carry it with me until I can’t carry anything anymore.

ABOUT CHRISTOPHER CITRO

Christopher Citro is the author of two full-length poetry books: If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). In 2025 he’ll have two collaborative poetry chapbooks published: The Box We Put the World in to Keep a Corner From Shattering (Aureole Press), co-written with Steve Castro and Dustin Pearson, and I Wear a Top Hat When I Go Into the Forest (Ghost City Press), co-written with Dustin Nightingale. Christopher lives in sunny Syracuse, New York.