Charles Wright, from Littlefoot (#8)

Good luck is a locked door,
                          but the key's around here somewhere.
Meanwhile, half-hidden under the thick staircase of memory,
One hears the footsteps go up and the footsteps go down.

As water mirrors the moon, the earth mirrors heaven,
Where things without shadows have shadows.
A lifetime isn't too much to pay
                                for such a reflection.

Littlefoot is a book-length poem in which Wright, coming up on his seventieth birthday, confronts the big questions of life and death. The New Yorker published section 14, section 32, and section 34 earlier this year, while the Academy of American Poets put section 19 on its website. Wright shows up frequently in our celebrations of poetry; I ran “Morning Occurence at Xanadu” in 2005 and “In Praise of Thomas Chatterton” the year before that.

9 June 2007 | poetry |