I Try to Waken and Greet the World Once Again

 In a pine tree, 

A few yards away from my window sill,

 A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down,

 On a branch. 

 I laugh, as I see him abandon himself

 To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do 

That the branch will not break.

-- James Wright 

 This short poem furnished the title of Wright’s 1963 collection, The Branch Will Not Break, sometimes considered his best book, and certainly the one that blew me away in college. This lovely little poem, poignant now, nearly an elegy.

Poetry Monday: People Like Us

 

People Like Us

 for James Wright 

There are more like us. All over the world

 There are confused people, who can’t remember

 The name of their dog when they wake up, and people

 Who love God but can’t remember where

 He was when they went to sleep. It’s

 All right. The world cleanses itself this way.

 A wrong number occurs to you in the middle

 Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time 

To save the house. And the second-story man

 Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,

 And he’s lonely, and they talk, and the thief

 Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

 You can wander into the wrong classroom,

 And hear great poems lovingly spoken

 By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,

 And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe.

Robert Bly

 Bly published this in 2013 when he was 87, and dedicated it to his old friend James Wright, a poet who was a year younger than Bly but never got old, because he died in 1980 at the age of 53. When I saw this date again, I realized that when I heard Bly and Wright read together in Pittsburgh, it must have been in the last decade of Wright’s life. Bly had published a book on Wright in 2005. Bly gave his last public reading in 2015. His Collected Poems were published in 2019. He is 94. 

The top photo is by Henri Cartier-Bresson, French photographer of mostly urban scenes from the 1930s through the 1960s.  For awhile he was my favorite photographer, and at least in the way he frames his photos, he is again.

Poetry Monday: A Blessing

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their
       happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans.  They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the
       darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
into blossom.

--James Wright

James Wright on horseback with fellow poet Robert Bly, who is
the friend mentioned in this poem