City of Light Across the Water

Poppy Red’s Encaustic Painting

Charles Wright won the Pulitzer Prize (1998) for Black Zodiac.

Wright served as U.S. poet laureate of the United States from 2014 to 2015.

On writing poetry, Charles Wright  says:

“Language is the element of definition, the defining and descriptive incantation. It puts the coin between our teeth. It whistles the boat up. It shows us the city of light across the water. Without language there is no poetry, without poetry there’s just talk. Talk is cheap and proves nothing. Poetry is dear and difficult to come by. But it poles us across the river and puts music in our ears.”

Dancing Never Dies

         Poppy Red’s Encaustic painting

January 31

by David Lehman

The sky is crumbling into millions of paper dots
the wind blows in my face
so I duck into my favorite barbershop
and listen to Vivaldi and look in the mirror
reflecting the shopfront windows, Broadway
and 104th, and watch the dots blown by the wind
blow into the faces of the walkers outside
& here comes a thin old man swaddled in scarves,
he must be seventy-five, walking slowly,
and in his mind there is a young man dancing,
maybe seventeen years old, on a June evening—
                              he is that young man, I can tell, watching him walk