Charles Wright
The music of memory has its own pitch,/which not everyone hears.Collection: Memories
It may not be written in any book, but it is written - You can't go back, you can't repeat the unrepeatable.Collection: Book
If you want great tranquility/ It's hard work and a long walkCollection: Hard Work
It’s up there, and you can see the front of it. But what it is isn’t what you’re looking at. It’s behind what you’re looking at.Collection: Behinds
We've all led raucous lives, some of them inside, some of them out. But only the poem you leave behind is what's important. Everyone knows this. The voyage into the interior is all that matters, Whatever your ride. Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read. Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times His own weight a day just to stay alive. Now that's a life on the edge.Collection: Giving
What makes us leave what we love best? What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself When we need it most, That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake And holds us flush there until we begin to love it And have to begin again? What is it within our own lives we decline to live Whenever we find it, making our days unendurable, And nights almost visionless? I still don't know yet, but I do it.Collection: Night
The ache for anything is a thick dust in the heart.Collection: Heart
Poetry is the dark side of the moon.Collection: Dark
Our dreams are luminous, a cast fire upon the world. Morning arrives and that's it. Sunlight darkens the earth.Collection: Dream
All forms of landscape are autobiographical.Collection: Landscape
It's linkage I'm talking about, and harmonies and structures, And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.Collection: Past
How many times can summer turn to fall in one life?Collection: Summer
November’s a burn and an ache.Collection: November
How many years have slipped through our hands? At least as many as the constellations we still can identify. The quarter moon, like a light skiff, floats out of the mist-remnants Of last night’s hard rain. It, too, will slip through our fingers with no ripple, without us in it.Collection: Rain