December 7, 2022, 11:28am
I didn’t know I needed it this morning, but here is a previously unpublished poem by the late and truly great CD Wright (gone too soon). The poem, called “Abandon Yourself to That Which is Inevitable,” appears in the Spring 2022 of Conjunctions (which, thankfully, survived its run-in with funding cuts) as one of three previously unpublished poems chosen by Wright’s husband, the also excellent poet Forrest Gander.
There are many to choose from, but here are a few of my favorite lines, characteristic of Wright’s uncanny knack for beauty delivered via off-kilter syntax and unlikely line-break:
“Smell of dog, no, drunkard’s urine on the wrought iron. A button and a condom on the walk.”
“A pergola struggling to support its vine. All but aloud it struggles.”
“The blue / spruce leaning; loyal oak in chunks. A trench / part-dug to re-route the run-off.”
“The relict lay reading below a house so large it could rain in front with no cloud in sight around back. Unseasonable sadness of unseen sprinklers.”
It is hard to isolate why exactly these lines are so quintessentially CD Wright for me, but luckily, I am not a poetry critic (just a regular guy who likes poetry), so I will spare us all the attempt. Sigh. It is a lovely thing to have unexpected new work from a writer gone too early—for that I am grateful.