memory, this trace of memory, is then packed
away:
...Iwent to sleep
And never told anyone
Till years later when I thought I knew
what it meant,
which now I’ve forgot. (76)
The scar, the sensible impression made by
the tactile experience, is not gone; it can still be
traced, fingered, attended to, re-presented. Its
meaning, however, cannot; the analytic maneu-
ver necessary to ‘‘explain’’ the event is not the
event itself. The poetic maneuver, on the other
hand, is one particular trace of the event, one
tracing of the scar, one representation. The
narrative tracing this story is image-strong; if
one doesn’t remember the language, one does
remember the elements of the scene: the boy,
the tent, the bear, the cliff, the rhododendron.
And yet curiously, more than half the narrative
is constructed not directly from memory, but
from logic. Based on the empirical information
available to him upon waking (cliff’s edge, bear’s
side) as memory, the speaker constructs a narra-
tive to ‘‘explain’’ his arrival at that point. His
explanation is marked by phrases like ‘‘appa-
rently’’ and ‘‘it appears.’’ He uses inference to
construct the line or trace of his steps, to lead
up to the site of memory’s scar, the source and
moment of sensation.
The second story—‘‘this one is questionable’’—
is even more quickly presented. Its ‘‘questionable’’
status is the result of the fact that it’s a piece of
hearsay,‘‘sworntomebyanoldfriend.’’(Notethe
repeated emphasis on the sworn quality of the
words used to convey both stories.) This one ends
with a physical image: an old friend, having killed a
rattlesnake in the morning, puts it in a sack and then
leaves it in the back of his jeep. After a day’s work he
remembers the snake:
That evening he started to show the
snake
To someone, and put his hand in the
sack to pull it out.
As he reached in, the snake’s stump
struck him.
His wrist was bruised for a week.
(World, 77)
Very southern, very folksy, but also very
emblematic. One secret of poetry is pain, the vis-
ceral bruise to the heart; and these stories become
interesting in any thought about Wright’s poetic
when one observes the use he makes of them in the
context of ‘‘Two Stories’’: how to think about
mortality. A story about a surreal memory from
childhood, a memory of how precarious one’s life
is, always, and another (once removed through the
retelling) of the power of a dead thing to strike out
and wound, to bruise, to mark us.
Wright’s thinking about mortality is even
more apparent in the poems collected inChina
Trace (1977), about which Wright has said
that ‘‘each individual poem was a chapter in an
ongoing story about a character who went from
childhood to his demise and inscription in the
heaven of the fixed stars’’ (Quarter Notes, 115).
The brief lyric ‘‘Snow’’ appears as the second
poem inChina Traceand immediately strikes a
mixed tone of resolve, wit, and preoccupation
with final things. What at first appears to be
serviceable image (deep or surreal) turns out to
be declarative statement, rich with overtones of
interrogation and ambiguity, presented as mate-
rial fact. J.D. McClatchy has said that the
‘‘rationalistic logic [of the poem] is used to set
up an improbable situation’’ (33), but this is only
true at first glance, for logic is not the ultimate
engine that drives the poem. Instead, what seems
an image, a metaphor, an improbability—rising
dust, wind and cloud, ourselves as snow—proves
in the unpacking to be declarative: we will
become and in fact already are things that fall,
that ‘‘snow.’’ But the declarative nature of the
statement is suspect, teased in and out of mean-
ing by the tension among syntax, line, and antici-
pated cultural value:
If we, as we are, are dust, and dust, as it
will, rises,
Then we will rise, and recongregate
In the wind, in the cloud, and be their
issue,
Things in a fall in a world of fall, and
slip
Through the spiked branches and
snapped joints of the evergreens,
White ants, white ants and the little ribs.
(Country Music, 112)
‘‘Snow’’ is a delicate instruction in the coun-
terpoint between lineation and syntax in the
service of the image. The tension generated in
the give and take of its single sentence will
encourage the formalist to seek resolution and
closure. McClatchy, for example, in his attempt
to affirm Wright’s control and the unity of the
text, claims that ‘‘[t]he poem’s rhetoric is its
true binding agent’’ (33), a chemical metaphorWords Are the Diminution of All Things