~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Featured Poet • William Wright

WILLIAM WRIGHT is author or editor of over twenty nationally published books, with several forthcoming. Most recently, Wright published Grass Chapels: New & Selected Poems with Mercer University Press in 2021. Wright has been named the Georgia Author of the Year, the Georgia Editor of the Year, and won the Terrain.org Grand Prize. Wright was named Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee in 2016 and Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and Oxford College of Emory from 2017-2020.

Poems: “Boyhood Trapped between Water and Blood,” (Terrain.org), “The Child” (Birmingham Poetry Review), and “Grief Map” (StorySouth), all published in Grass Chapels: New & Selected Poems (Mercer UP, 2021).

Boyhood Trapped between Water and Blood

1.

A boy, I knew nothing of the copperhead’s fangs,
swam with them most summers, sank with their faint mint smell
and blue-lit ripple flames of their bodies in creek water—

Kestrels of light
lunged through the water surface and flattened into one great trellis
of sun, every contour of the creek bed
branded in a fire that wove
                                             its shape into shapelessness.

Salamanders and crawdads never bothered me,
nor the ticks that teemed on every branch—

                                             I was alone
in that chapel of water and wind.

I lived in a yellow house smothered in leaf-shadow
and would dream at night of the creek, clear
as the smell of wood smoke
on a winter dusk blown with stars,
                                             even as June rains
engraved the water
with meaning, forever blurred by the sudsy iron that
                                             turned water to blood.
My eyes itched with a grief
that was mine and not mine—

                                             every night, every night.

North into woods, just out of view,
leaned a rotten three-walled shack
with no roof and the words “die nigger” inscribed

in blood on the west wall—the letters
flanked in blood-red swastikas,

                                             a shade of crimson
like the dace that darted in the creek’s oxbows;
and there were still signs
of a struggle: scraps of a green T-shirt,
a broken window toothed in the same blood,
the shattered pane like an eye
blinded,                                never storm-cleansed,
                                             never burned away.
2.

A boy, I carried sun-drunken notions
of time as song, the crispness
of fall and its subtle rumor—

I did not know why the wind
stirred some father-witted guilt
in me, and as I jumped
from one side of the ditch
to the other again and again,

I could not evade visions
of a man taken by a horde of others
and dragged through
briars and the indifference
of deerberry and resurrection fern—

I knew even then, a boy,
that the man was being forced through
the final door for nothing
more than pigmentation,
and that the only sound he made
were the gasps of air the men
kicked out of him
as he lay fading in silence,
his last possession.

And there in the bramble still lay his clothes.
And there on the jagged stone lay the vision of his head.

3.

A boy, I craved design,
a structure through which I came to
understand or escape

words that followed me
like the sound of footfalls
in the leaf-litter just behind actual passage.

Some nights in spring the song thrush
bore out its brash and beautiful music,
as if the world had torn
and revealed an answer,

as if something more had pursued
me and kindled my insomnia
with a plea.

4.

Once a black boy named Seneca
ran with me down the road
and his family waved at us
and shouted encouragements.

We leaned headlong into our running
until breathless,
reckless through the moths
and the distant orchard light

and the moon-curve against
the back of my grandparents’
home where a lamp flicked
on and glowed as we passed.

That same night my grandmother
yanked me in and belted me
until I bled,
screaming the scriptures
until I could weep them back—

my crime the mere nearness
to a “nigger boy,” the “tacky” fact
that we were both fierce with joy.

5.

Eastward, heaps of goat bones dotted
a baseball field overgrown in sicklepod,
                                             and every dusk for months
Seneca and I met to sift
through those mythic shapes, to stare
into the eye sockets of many skulls
as if they might rouse in us some memory
of another time, another creature,
to elude the heat and stifle

of that place, scalded with resentments
extravagant as the trees’ canopy,
the woods between my house
and the other world always nightfall,
                                             unbroken shadow.

The Child

Because there will be a child, grown from the pit
of the past, sky-whittled, seeded in the eastern pastures
            of an Earth we will never know; because there will be
            a child who walks a stream with feet evolved numb
            such that blood leaks from her soles as she paces
the feldspar’s sharp ridges; and because she will see
as many bones of humans as of bear and bobcat
            and in her digging for worms witness

cellphones and scapulae, steel cups and prawns
of Styrofoam, she will not know what to make of this world.
            Because there will be a child who is born
            from something wombed by machine or flora or animal,
            she will eat water hemlock just as soon as redhaw apples,
enough to keep her upright and unnamable (for she cannot name)—
            and she will love the world such that all voids close behind her,
            and she will know to tread carefully on September slopes,

when leaves fall and slip through mud to the creek
pocked with snakes—never cruel. And because the child will grow,
            forged with eyes large as a pair of vipers’ heads,
            she will see the farthest galactic wedge with ease;
            her mind will travel into its wieldy orbits and know all
stars that moor her to the Earth, and she will lie
down in soft grasses as days and wind and rains
            pass over. All atoms will snarl their greenest mysteries

around her, and in her last dark she will know each of them
and their least trajectories, and no animal will blame
            and eat her for their hunger, for the final heart’s
            renaissance will ripen green in her throat and burst
            from her with a brightness borne of pure chlorophyll—
and she will grow and bleed for a million million summer-long days,
            twine to the tips of squall-bowed trees. She will root herself
            in the lowest creek and pulse in her new untamable nativity.

Grief Map

Dodd Hopkins lost his mind the day after his wife passed,
left his bed hours before the sun tipped the mountain’s edge.
The morning wind was to his ear a prophetic tongue.

In sleeping clothes, barefoot, the moon’s scant flame to light
his way, he walked into woods over briars and bramble
fully numb, wandered until dawn dipped the sky

in blue. He gathered all the flowers he could find, made
trips back and forth from woods to home with armfuls
of fringed phacelia, trillium, gentian, trailing arbutus.

The land’s unsteady gable dizzied him, and, near noon,
his feet bleeding and the solar bath of light singeing his skin,
his brain absorbed the rate at which Earth spun.

He knew that no alchemies would summon
her, that no mix of ivy and thorn and blood would stall
the devils that carved the last of his sense away. He couldn’t

shake the vision of her body underground, bleeding dry.
So he reaped and reaped until he felt satisfied he’d upset
spring’s dark womb, made a hex of its design, and for weeks

more crept the ridges in mourning, snatching plants up
by fistfuls, his only solace the fibrous sounds of tearing taproot,
his smile the raveling of that embroidery.

He filled the house with her—blooms and leaves
took the shape her body had pressed into their bed. Nights
he cooked for two, placed wild onion and daffodils

in her supper chair. He lined apple leaves along the window
sills she used to crack to let the warmer seasons in.
Once he’d finished with the house, he transcribed her

into the winding path she’d tread in grass and mud
to tend their yard, to feed the garden until it fed them back.
And though all this work summoned her once or twice

to shimmer in his dreams, these steeped floras made the map
of grief he traveled every day, toiled to tend, even as all
he did to keep her there wilted, cracked, or blew away.