As Our Bodies Rise, Our Names Turn Into Light by Charles Wright

Sunlight spilled, 2010 by Marion

 

 

As Our Bodies Rise, Our Names Turn Into Light

By Charles Wright

 

The sky unrolls like a rug,

                                                unwelcoming, gun-grey,

Over the Blue Ridge.
Mothers are calling their children in,

                                                mellifluous syllables, floating sounds.

The traffic shimmies and settles back.

The doctor has filled his truck with leaves

Next door, and a pair of logs.

                                                Salt stones litter the street.

The snow falls and the wind drops.
How strange to have a name, any name, on this poor earth.

January hunkers down,

                                                the icicle deep in her throat---

The days become longer, the nights ground bitter and cold,
Single grain by single grain
Everything flows toward the structure,

                                                last ache in the ache for God.

1995

 

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I awoke shivering this morning because I went to bed with all the windows wide open last night.  It was a luscious, humidless 57 degrees.  I felt as if I'd been transported to another place and time.  It was near 100 degrees all last week. 

 

My orange cat brought me a baby rabbit almost as big as he was to the back door.  I thanked him, then rescued the poor, scared little bunny.  I sat in the cool sunlight and picked up my heavy "Norton Anthology of Poetry", all 1,376 pages of it, and it fell open to this poem.  Poetry has saved my life over and over and over again.  Few understand this, but the ones who do have also changed my life. 

 

Happy almost Autumn,

~Marion

 

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"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry."
~Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry," Reasons for Moving, 1968