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Charles Wright is the author of nearly thirty collections of poetry, most recently Sestets, Bye-and-Bye, and Caribou (all from Farrar, Straus and Giroux), as well as two books of criticism and a collection of translations of the Italian poet Eugenio Montale. Born in 1935 in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, Wright attended Davidson College and the Iowa…

I am interested in limits, specifically, in their ability to generate surprise, even freedom. —Linnéa Spransy The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. —Wendell Berry   THE CANVASAS IN LINNÉA SPRANSY’S studio explode with images rich and strange: ribbons and lobes reproducing like bacteria in…

The Performance MOHAMMED ALI, a.k.a. Aerosol Arabic, emerges from the darkness onto center stage for his 2014 TED talk at the Vatican (available for streaming at aerosolarabic.com). A burly man, he moves gracefully. He apologizes for the way he’s dressed—not in the snappy outfit of a celebrity lecturer, but in jeans, sneakers, open shirt, and…

______I am soft sift ______In an hourglass _____________ —Hopkins Against the darkening winterplum sky, a lone contrail whitens—loose thread, untufted cotton. A perfect inverse of me: ____________________________Lenten moon of my belly taut, halved by a slurred gray line. Linea nigra, the doctor says, my belly button’s new ashen tail a ghostly likeness of the cut…

Last week a jellied disc in one of my husband’s lower vertebrae cinched, slipped—on the x-ray the bones’ thorned edges gritted against each other, his whole spine yearning left, a lily stem arched toward the promise of light. Now the days shrink into themselves, the trees bare-limbed but for squirrels’ nests and the green bloom…

Midnight, mid-May. The earth supple with three weeks of rain, Queen Anne lacing the clover, dandelions racing the slope of hill behind our house. Water pooled in every nick and hollow bared to sky, moss slick and greening inside the curbs. Our dog noses through yards, puddle-pawed, until suddenly he is gone—bent to the wild…

A poor printing, eye blight, a spine of straw, the threshed and winnowed word, heaven unhusked, a kind of seed unpacked, conspicuous fantail, fishy contraband, rendered law, thunder’s ragged hymnal, bottomless wineskin warped from deluge and drying with the hay, frozen, frostbit, thawed and sighing like the heart, prodigal returned, a glass- bottomed boat, God…

On Plough Monday, a “fool plough” or “white plough” was dragged about the village by young ploughmen covered in ribbons and other gay ornaments; they asked for pennies at every door and, if refused, they ploughed the ground before the cottage. _________________________________________________—Peter Ackroyd At the first breaking of ground we prayed heaven speed the plow,…

Most days the labyrinth’s covered up with folding chairs, but Fridays it’s open even to unbelievers. Our docent says the labyrinth is not a maze, that the pilgrim cannot lose her way coiling toward the center rose. My pastor friend and I are chaperones, here to help field-tripping kids weave the ancient circuit that the…

__________The poet is in labor.    ______________—Denise Levertov   _______I confess the obvious, my inadequacy to translate famine to bread to feed all the hungry children on earth. Wish I could invent a happiness machine or dollar tree blossoming with nontaxable revenue for small businesses. Wish for a thousand bitcoins, wild doves of aqueous tongues,…