The Woodpecker Pecks, but the Hole does not Appear (by Charles Wright)
The Woodpecker Pecks, but the Hole does not Appear (by Charles Wright)
Original Text
Charles Wright, Scar Tissue (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). This
poem is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site (from the winning volume on the 2007 International Shortlist).
1It’s hard to imagine how unremembered we all become,
2How quickly all that we’ve done
3Is unremembered and unforgiven,
4 how quickly
5Bog lilies and yellow clover flashlight our footfalls,
6How quickly and finally the landscape subsumes us,
7And everything that we are becomes what we are not.
8This is not new, the orange finch
9And the yellow and dun finch
10 picking the dry clay politely,
11The grasses asleep in their green slips
12Before the noon can roust them,
13The sweet oblivion of the everyday
14 like a warm waistcoat
15Over the cold and endless body of memory.
16Cloud-scarce Montana morning.
17July, with its blue cheeks puffed out like a putto on an ancient map,
18Huffing the wind down from the northwest corner of things,
19Tweets on the evergreen stumps,
20 swallows treading the air,
21The ravens hawking from tree to tree, not you, not you,
22Is all that the world allows, and all one could wish for.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2011