are full of wonder and singularity, lifeline to the
unseen’’ (Halflife, 9).
The opening lines of the second section of
‘‘Homage’’ make this motif or conceit explicit:
‘‘Each year the dead grow less dead, and nudge /
Close to the surface of all things’’ (4). Again, as
in ‘‘Snow,’’ with its revelatory ‘‘things that fall,’’
and ‘‘Noon,’’ in which Wright projects his own
inevitable ‘‘rise... toward the sweet wrists of the
rose,’’ here too that which at first appears to be
merely image and then metaphor, turns out to be
statement: the dead do, through the most normal
of organic processes, ‘‘nudge / Close to the sur-
face’’ of the physical world, and become it.
This interwoven relationship between image
and language is made even more explicit in the
second stanza of this section. The nostalgia linking
the word to the world is here parodied, but gently.
For the dead, words, as they do in ‘‘Snow,’’ have
powdered into thingness. Language itself is explic-
itly imaged as physical, not cognitive:
Their glasses let loose, and grain by
grain return to the river bank.
They point to their favorite words
Growing around them, revealed as
themselves for the first time:
They stand close to the meanings and
take them in.
The dead, translated as they are into rocks,
and stones, and trees, do ‘‘take in,’’ or perhaps
take on, the ‘‘meanings’’ about them, grain by
grain; in short, they become (the meaning of) the
world.
By the fourth section, we arrive at lines that
place us in the poem and that line out the sepa-
ration between us and the dead: ‘‘We layer them
[the dead] in. We squint hard and terrace them
line by line’’ (6). This section draws out the very
thin line between what the dead represent—the
unseen, the white space—and what we are—the
seen, the fussy business of text. There are echoes
here of ‘‘Noon’’ and ‘‘Dog Creek Mainline’’:
And so we are come between, and cry
out,
And stare up at the sky and its cloudy
panes,
And finger the cypress twists.
The dead understand all this, and keep
in touch,
Rustle of hand to hand in the lemon
trees,Flags, and the great sifts of anger
To powder and nothingness.
The dead are a cadmium blue, and they
understand.
To know everything, Wright suggests, is to
know nothing,...toknow nothing.
In section six the voice of the poem imagines
the dead indoors, lifting us—or lifting conscious-
ness—free from the body, making of us ‘‘what
we’ve longed for... [a] song without words.’’ But
this transcendence is truly imaginary, a wishful
construction of this same consciousness that
images itself free, for, at the point of some
near-death crossing over, the consciousness
must re-enter the body, ‘‘Only to hear that it’s
not time. / Only to hear that we must re-enter
and lie still, our arms at rest at our sides, / The
voices rising around us like mist //And dew, it’s
all right, it’s all right, it’s all right....’’(8).
Again, the double pun: getting it all into writing,
getting all this Wright.
In the seventh section, we are returned again
to the landscape, where ‘‘[t]he dead fall around
us like rain,’’ and where, having been made
aware of the presence of the unseen in all the
ordinary things of the world, we begin to recog-
nize in those things even ourselves: ‘‘High in the
night sky the mirror is hauled up and unsheeted. /
In it we twist like stars’’ (9). This is who we are.
We are this. Our consciousness of the night sky is
the night sky. The night sky, because it is our
consciousness, is who we are. What we see, a
heaven full of stars, is what we appear to be.
In the final section of the poem, this sense of
the self as landscape and landscape as the self,
this motif—that we come to know the unseen by
attending to the seen—comes to fruition. Wright
has said, ‘‘I would like to become the mental
landscape that I write about’’ (Halflife, 103). In
section eight of ‘‘Homage to Paul Ce ́zanne’’ this
translation has occurred. We are dead:
We’re out here, our feet in the soil, our
heads craned up at the sky,
The stars streaming and bursting
behind the trees.
The landscape is the hieroglyph of the self
inscribed on the backdrop of eternity. It nudges
its truth toward us in the language of the poem:
What we are given in dreams we write as
blue paint,
Or messages to the clouds.Words Are the Diminution of All Things