You are all much too young to be listening to these poems. I hope someday you have the occasion to think back and say, “I remember when that old fool warned me about what was going to happen, and I didn’t pay any attention to him whatsoever.” As well you should not. This is called “The Woodpecker Pecks, but the Hole Does Not Appear.” That’s the funny part of my reading—it has nothing to do with the poem.

–Charles Wright, from a Fall, 2008 issue of Blackbird

[Over the July 4th weekend, I attended the 2nd annual Rothbury Music Festival. While my day to day life now is much more subdued than my younger years, moving more towards the pace of oceanic tides in the ground cover, moon phases, the open pages of passing seasons, the contrast is why it felt amazingly fresh to again be in an environment where the abandonments of self can also momentarily occur, vis-a-vis with other creative wonders, through a consummate within loud (subsuming the whole landscape loud!) externality of ongoing forms. Summer! Such as what live music can thunderously offer! Both while its being played, and then again when driving home afterward: the equalizing silence within the variant shifts in all the clouds, a hole there, the full moon close to the horizon softening needled tops of pines along the highway. Being finally at home not as a destination, but an ongoing cycle of form and formlessness.]

Its hard to imagine
how unrembered
we all become

How quickly
all that we’ve done
Is unremebered
and unforgiven,

......how quickly
Bog lilies and yellow
clover flashlight
our footfalls,

How quickly and finally
the landscape
subsumes us,

And everything that
we are becomes
what we are not.

This is not new,

the orange finch
And the yellow
and dun finch
picking the
dry clay politely,

The grasses asleep
in their green slips
Before the noon
can roust them,

The sweet oblivion
of the everyday
like a warm waistcoat

Over the cold and endless
body of memory.

Cloud scarce
Montana morning.

July,
with it’s blue cheeks
puffed out like a putto
on an ancient map,

Huffing the wind down
from the northwest
corner of things,

Tweets on the
evergreen stumps,
swallows treading
the air,

The ravens hawking
from tree to tree,

not you, not you

Is all that the
world allows,
and all one
could wish for.

--“The Woodpecker Pecks, but the Hole Does Not Appear”, Charles Wright (as transcribed from the Griffin Poetry Prize Youtube channel recording of Wright reading the poem)