A Memory Amber
a poem from Charles Wright
Entering the Verse-Verse
For the month of April, I will be sharing my favorite poems from my favorite poets. I am starting with a poem which, like the very best ones, I have no recollection of discovering. Logically, I would have found it in an anthology or a periodical, but I don’t remember which one or when that was.
Great poems are like great music: they find you one day, and your body is never the same. After you hear them, you will carry the images, the tone and the timbre inside you for the rest of your life.
This is an excerpt from Transparencies.
Transparencies
Our lives, it seems are a memory
we had once in another place.
Or are they its metaphor?
The trees, if trees they are, seem the same,
and the creeks do.
The sunlight blurts its lucidity in the same way,
And the clouds, if clouds they really are,
still follow us,
One after one, as they did in the old sky, in the old place.
I wanted the metaphor, if metaphor it is, to remain
always the same one.
I wanted the hills to be the same,
And the rivers too,
especially the old rivers,
The French Broad and Little Pigeon, the Holston and Tennessee,
And me beside them, under the stopped clouds and the stopped stars.
I wanted to walk in that metaphor,
untouched by time's corruption.
I wanted the memory adamantine, never-changing.
I wanted the memory amber,
and me in it...
-from Scar Tissue ©2006. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
If you enjoy discovering new poetry that will astound and inspire you, I highly recommend subscribing to Poetry Today by Maya C. Popa and Poetic Outlawsby Erik Rittenberry—two publications dedicated to sharing some of the world’s greatest poetry.
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