Chickamauga
by Charles Wright
Dove-twirl in the tall grass.
End-of-summer glaze next door
On the gloves and split ends of the conked magnolia tree.
Work sounds: truck back-up-beep, wood
tin-hammer, cicada, fire horn.
History handles our past like spoiled fruit.
Mid-morning, late-century light
calicoed under the peach trees.
Fingers us here. Fingers us here and here.
The poem is a code with no message:
The point of the mask is not the mask but
the face underneath,
Absolute, incommunicado,
unhoused and peregrine.
The gill net of history will pluck us soon enough
From the cold waters of self-contentment
we drift in
One by one
into its suffocating light and air.
Structure becomes an element of belief,
syntax
And grammar a catechist,
Their words what the beads say,
words thumbed to our discontent.
Analytical Paragraph of Chickamauga
by Dennis Gugger
The famous poem “Chickamauga” by Charles Wright describes the wisdom behind poetry; there is more to a poem than just the words. The author begins “Chickamauga” with a character that is on the countryside and enjoying the nature around him. Slowly Charles Wright explains what is hidden in the poems. He discusses about how the grammar and the structure are crucial in a well-written poem. A poem is very much like a mask, once you have figured out who the character underneath the mask is, you have figured out what the poem is about. Wright uses a metaphor comparing a mask and a poem, “The point of the mask is not the mask but/ the face underneath”. Wright uses many comparisons like the words as beads to get us to figure out the overall message of the poem. Wright creates very good imagery to help us see what poems are really about. The many metaphors that Charles Wright uses helps us see that a poem is often like many other objects. Charles Wright is changing many peoples’ view of poems with his great imagery and wide sense of vocabulary.
Deep
Measure
By Charles Wright
In this poem Charles Wright uses life and a deck of cards as a metaphor. He uses his great sense of vocabulary in this poem. This poem is a part of the book called the Black Zodiac which was published in 1997
Shank of the
afternoon, wan weight-light
Undercard of a short month, February Sunday
Wordlessness of the wrong world
In the day's dark niche, the patron saint of what-Goes-Down
Shuffles her
golden deck and deals
on for you and one for me...
And that's it, a single number -- we play what we get
My hand says measure,
doves on the wire and the first bulb blades
Edging up through the mulch-mat,
Inside-out of the winter gum trees,
A cold harbor, cold stop and two-step, and here it comes,
Deep measure,
deep measure that runnels beneath the bone,
That sways our attitude and sets our lives to muse;
Deep measure, down under and death drawn
Pilgrim, homeboy of false time,
Listen and set your foot down, listen and step lightly
Night Music
By Charles Wright
In this poem Wright creates great imagery about the sunlight reaching the earth. He explains how people can have or want a dark side. Since they are getting so much of the light
Each second the
earth is struck hard
by four-and-a-half pounds of sunlight
Each second
Try to imagine that
No wonder deep shade is what the soul longs for,
And not, as we always thought, the light.
No wonder the
inner life is dark.
Sounding, and sicced on like a dog
they all go down and devolve
Vowel-dancing, hear-sick
Hoping for realignment and a space that won't shine
Unlike the
October moon, Apached and blade-dazzled, smalled
Down the western sky
into Ovidian intersect
with time and its ghostly renderings.
Unlike the leaves of the ash tree, moon-treated and hanging on
For on day longer or so.
Unlike our shrunk selves, dripping like washing on the line.