Episode 077 Clear Night - Charles Wright

Connor and Jack delve into the poem "Clear Night" by the titan Charles Wright. They discuss the poem's intensity of emotion, the English Renaissance poet John Donne, Connor's hypothetical moody high school journals, and Star Wars Ring Theory.

Learn more about Wright here: www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/charles-wright

Clear Night
By: Charles Wright

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.
Moon-fingers lay down their same routine
On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.
Bird hush and bird song. A cassia flower falls.

I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.

And the wind says “What?” to me.
And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say “What?” to me.
And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.
And the gears notch and the engines wheel.