Jay Wright

Nomadic hearts know there is no rose

waiting at every door, that often a threshold’s

atmosphere can be worth your life.

Even so, memory must have led us here.

After Perote, the old bus gathers its wings

and swings us through the happy

undulations of fog- and cloud-bound hills,

toward Xalapa, with the cross in its name.

I expect a familiar sand, pillowed against

walls gone red and grainy with heat,

and a muezzin’s bell

knitting the loose cloth of evening.

But the heart is a fraudulent voice, a wily ear,

and memory can be too staunchly evangelic.

So the bell goes, in the whisper of matins and vespers,

and the constant idiot’s rain dresses the walls

in filmy gray.

I should be grateful that memory has left

an anteroom, where I can stock

the cobbled street that leads me to tortillas

and the nuns’ diabolic chiles,

or watch the blue-serged licenciado

parade his cane along the Avenida Zamora.

Perhaps I should reserve another room

for the Pérgola’s alambres,

and the surpliced children

(hand in hand through the park to school)

and the violet insistence of late afternoon

with coffee and pan on the terrace.

Looking forward, I see the moment

I will choose to leave this garden,

when, on a cloistered morning in April,

I stand in the post office’s tiled vestibule

and unlock the rage that you

will understand

and a nomadic heart will carry away.

From BOLEROS (Princeton Univ. Press, 1991)

All through a bitter April,

spring has refused our invitation.

Still, the inner seasons turn,

and, when the ice breaks

and the blue water furs white

over the rocks in small streams,

the silence that had blanketed itself

in the crippled apple tree

walks away.

I hear that silence in the water

when I stand on the pond’s edge,

and watch my father brace himself

in the stocks of his fish house

out on the ice, a silence

that seems a loon weariness,

a burden of lost bear,

lately moaning coyotes cutting

through the sheep’s straw fur,

for the kill.

Over the ridge now, I see morning

rise in white smoke over white houses,

and know the cows have awakened

to their milky certainties.

I awaken to the depth charge of my own

stove’s fire, having dreamed all night

of the smoky weeds lying deep in the pond

and the past certainties of mid-May,

when a blaze of dandelions lit my path

to the water.

Spring’s reasons come hard through the trunk of winter.

A father like mine can spend too long in a mind’s ditch,

filled with paper potatoes, curdled cabbage, squash

and zucchini blooming in floods;

can huddle too long

with death’s gazette, chimney fires, a son’s leaving,

a barn gone down under heavy snow.

I would awaken the water’s flow in winter,

and have him uncoil in his boat,

with the peppery summer wind tugging at his laziness.

That would be more than the sap of April’s promise,

less than April’s refusal.

Mid-May.

I grow impatient with the lazy sting of blackflies,

with the patient way my neighbors snuffle

in their gardens and gauze them for the cold nights,

with the loggers’ bourbon legends, and with the clouds

down from Canada spread-eagled over treetops.

“Something the heart here misses.”

But wise old Indian Pond erupts on the left hand of spring.

In the sand at its feet,

someone, borrowing the incense and fire of another life,

has cut a crescent moon, to mark the place

where tethered April broke

and disappeared.

From BOLEROS (Princeton Univ. Press, 1991)

It would be easier

to bury our dead

at the corner lot.

No need to wake

before sunrise,

take three buses,

walk two blocks,

search at the rear

of the cemetery,

to come upon the familiar names

with wilted flowers and patience.

But now I am here again.

After so many years

of coming here,

passing the sealed mausoleums,

the pretentious brooks and springs,

the white, sturdy limestone crosses,

the pattern of the place is clear to me.

I am going back to the Black limbo,

an unwritten history

of our own tensions.

The dead lie here

in a hierarchy of small defeats.

I can almost see the leaders smile,

ashamed now of standing

at the head of those

who lie tangled

at the edge of the cemetery

still ready to curse and rage

as I do.

Here, I stop by the imitative cross

of one who stocked his parlor

with pictures of Robeson,

and would boom down the days,

dreaming of Othello’s robes.

I say he never bothered me,

and forgive his frightened singing.

Here, I stop by the simple mound

of a woman who taught me

spelling on the sly,

parsing my tongue

to make me fit for her own dreams.

I could go on all day,

unhappily recognizing small heroes,

discontent with finding them here,

reproaches to my own failings.

Uneasy, I search the names

and simple mounds I call my own,

abruptly drop my wilted flowers,

and turn for home.

From SELECTED POEMS OF JAY WRIGHT (Princeton Univ. Press, 1987)