in the clarity of all that he senses, that he will one
day make his ‘‘slow rise through the dark toward
the sweet wrists of the rose.’’ Wright articulates
here his own desire (being ash, even so) not only
to recognize himself against the vast horizon of
time and space—the distinct but vanishing trace
of a conceptualized self against a Chinese land-
scape—but also to create and even name the
backdrop of his own life, Crane’s sub specie
aeternitatis, and to recognize it now.
But the clearest answer against the question of
nothingness inherent in the world, raised obliquely
in ‘‘Noon,’’ comes in the long, opening poem to
The Southern Cross, published in 1981, ‘‘Homage
to Paul Ce ́zanne.’’ This poem is a meditative,
incantatory susurration on the theme of how the
unsayable gets said. Its title is significant because,
though the poem is not ‘‘about’’ Ce ́zanne in any
didactic or elegiac sense, it nevertheless signals
Wright’s preoccupation with Ce ́zanne’s technique
and vision, not unlike his own, a technique and
vision Bruce Bond refers to as the painter’s
attempt to bring into the viewer’s consciousness
‘‘both the immanence of sensation and the seduc-
tion of the unseen’’ (264).
Like ‘‘Noon’’ as well as ‘‘Snow,’’ ‘‘Homage to
Paul Ce ́zanne’’ is a structurally balanced poem in
which variation within the limits of repetition is a
primary value. It is composed of 128 lines laced
across eight sections of 16 lines each. Wright alters
the stanzaic arrangement within each section so
that we never encounter the same pattern twice;
we are confronted as it were with the same subject
in a variety of mirrors, ordifferent arrangements
of color generated through a prism—the same
light, perhaps, but its result from a different
angle. The first section, for example, is made of
four stanzas of, in order, six lines, another six,
three, then one; the second is made of four qua-
trains; the third of two octets; the fourth of eight
couplets, and so on.
In its opening stanza, ‘‘Homage to Paul
Ce ́zanne’’ pulls us immediately into the thematic
exploration of the relationship between image
and word, the pre-verbal and language, the
seen and the unseen. Its first three lines, Wright
has explained, began after he observed from his
window pieces of white paper in a field. The next
three lines ratchet up the poem from image
toward idea:
At night, in the fish light of the moon,
the dead wear our white shirts
To stay warm, and litter the fields.We pick them up in the mornings, dewy
pieces of paper and scraps of cloth.
Like us, they refract themselves. Like
us,
They keep on saying the same thing,
trying to get it right.
Like us, the water unsettles their names.
The crucial word is ‘‘refract.’’ Like us, the
dead refract themselves. How we make the self
present to the self, how we come to the world
and say it, how we articulate feeling through
form, are acts of neither reflection nor translu-
cence, but of refraction, a process in which expe-
rienced felt thought is inevitably distorted by the
medium into which it passes. In this case, the
medium is words, which, like the dead, we ‘‘keep
on saying... , trying to get it right (i.e., to get it
‘‘written,’’ and in this case, to make it ‘‘Wright’’).
What gets refracted through the poem is one vis-
ceral and emotional way of knowing mortality,
the felt apprehension of death broken up into
constructed verbal units, image-driven lines, verses
that turn and angle our pre-verbal selves through
their representation in words. And the words
themselves are the cause of this refraction, the
difficulty we have in saying that which isn’t easily
translated into consciousness.
The first section of ‘‘Homage to Paul
Ce ́zanne’’ ends with a cluster of images that
present Wright’s recurrent motif, that the phys-
ical image is a means of getting at the non-
physical:
They reach up from the ice plant.
They shuttle their messengers through
the oat grass.
Their answers rise like rest on the stalks
and the spidery leaves.
We rub them off our hands.
With these lines we are alerted to the pri-
mary conceit of the poem, that the unseen, that
which we are unable overtly to bring over into
consciousness, may be apprehended, if at all,
through attention to the seen. The image, espe-
cially the image made from the apparent world,
and especially as it is pressed toward metaphor,
provides a code other than the logical code of
‘‘rational’’ knowing. In his comments on another
artist, Giorgio Morandi, Wright provides a clue
to his own technique; speaking of two pencil
drawings, he says, ‘‘[i]n both, the windows into
the invisible are lit; in both, what is not there is at
least as powerful and tactile as what is... TheyWords Are the Diminution of All Things