C.D. Wright, ShallCross

Imaginary August

If one stood perfectly still. Even in the withering hours

of then. Hair down to here. Being alive and quiet.

One could forget oneself. Forget what one didn’t even recognize.

How mad it felt. Subliminally. One could pick out goldfinches

and mourning cloaks among the dying stalks of cosmos,

and across the ditch of grey wastewater they use to irrigate

the burial ground, a young man in a late-flowering tree

taking our photograph.

The most recent collection by the late American poet C.D. Wright (1949-2016) is ShallCross (Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2017), a book she finished editing just before her unexpected death, early last year. With such a book comes an enormous amount of mixed feelings: delight at the possibility of another volume by a beloved poet, and the reminder of just what it is we have lost. The strengths of this collection include what have always stood out in her work: the ability to articulate the most intimate of moments, recording and acknowledging deeply personal stories of human grief and suffering, and turning expectation and language around in the simplest ways, including details such as capturing how “a piano is being moved / by someone not listening / to the rain from one end / of the room to another” (“Poem with a Missing Pilot”) to “A study concluded, for a park / to be successful there had to be a woman. / The man next to the monument must have broken / away from her. Perhaps years / before.” (“Obscurity and Elegance”) to the openings of “Imaginary Suitcase,” that writes: “This belonged to your mother. Now / it is yours though you have no memory / of her and we’ll never know if she wrote it / by herself or copied it down from a book.” The poems and sections of the collection exist in a collage of what Wright did best in her work: allowing her empathy and attention to articulate the heart of what is so often overlooked or taken for granted, writing a series of poems for all the senses, writing: “Whether or not the water was freezing. The body / would break its sheath. Without layer on layer / of feather and air to insulate the loving belly.” (“Imagining Morning Glory”).

The longer poem, “Breathtaken,” extends the elegiac nature of her previous works with the photographer Deborah Luster, “as a corollary to” her Tooth for an Eye: A Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish.” Through this sequence, as with her previous collaboration with Luster, One Big Self, Wright articulates a series of acknowledgments, recording those who have lost and have been lost through homicide, writing: “[Fabulous, that was her byword] // inside a black Toyota Scion // inside her ransacked house // inside Happy Jack Social and Pleasure Club // lying on the street [.]” Writing out a sequence less one about giving voice than allowing voice, allowing for a particular level of questions and an open grief:

What was your loved one’s best physical feature

Could you draw that feature blind

Did your loved one have a sweet tooth

What was your loved one’s prized possession

Did you keep a piece of your loved one’s clothing

Was your loved one a day person or a night person

Was your loved one a good mimic

Was your loved one a good loser

C.D. Wright's One Big Self: an investigation

My Dear Conflicted Reader,

If you will grant me that most of us have an equivocal nature, and that when we waken we have not made up our minds which direction we're headed; so that — you might see a man driving to work in a perfume- and dye-free shirt, and a woman with an overdone tan hold up an orange flag in one hand, a Virginia Slim in the other — as if this were their predestination. Grant me that both of them were likely contemplating a different scheme of things. WHERE DO YOU WANT TO SPEND ETERNITY the church marquee demands on the way to my boy's school, SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING. I admit I had not thought of where or which direction in exactly those terms. The radio ministry says g-o-d has a wrong-answer button and we are all waiting for it to go off…

Count your grey hairs

Count your chigger bites

Count your pills

Count the times the phone rings

Count your T cells

Count your mosquito bites

Count the days since your last menses

Count the chickens you've eaten

Count your cankers

Count the storm candles

Count your stitches

Count your broken bones

Count the flies you killed before noon

In this new edition of her collaboration with friend and photographer Deborah Luster, American poet C.D. Wright works an intricate and heartstrong long poem about prison life through visits with inmates in three American prisons, and working through prison literature, road signs, correspondence, "the growth industry of incarceration" and everything else she manages to weave in to this magnificent piece, One Big Self: an investigation (Port Townsend WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007). Originally built as a collaborative effort between Wright's texts and Luster's photographs and published as such in 2003 by Lost Roads, this new edition, republished by Copper Canyon Press in 2007, is just the poem; how I envy those readers who were able to experience the edition that carried both. The author of a dozen previous poetry collections including Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Copper Canyon, 2005), Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon, 2002) and Deepstep Come Shining (Copper Canyon, 1998), C.D. Wright's One Big Self: an investigation incorporates the best elements of what she has worked in her poetry and prose for years, including an extended range of style that weaves collage-like into a quilt of many fabrics, shapes and colours. With only the single photo on the front cover and another on the back, this is a single poem that not only comes out of prison life but seems to live within it, within all the heartbreak of women who leave for a day to give birth and then return, some of whom never see their children again; women with families they've been cut off from, cut off by and cut off because. As Wright writes in her opening prose piece, "Stripe for Stripe":

I remember an afternoon at the iron pile at Transylvania watching the men plait each other's hair between sets at the weight bench. When I asked about a man whose face was severely scarred, a very specific face, with large, direct aquamarine eyes, a guard told me that the man's brother had thrown a tire over his head and set it on fire. This I did not know how to absorb. It was a steaming day; the men were lifting weights and plaiting their hair.

I remember Easter weekend at the women's prison. The day before, a long line formed outside the prison-run beauty shop. Inside, the women having their hair fixed were talking back to the soap operas on the small snowy screen. By visiting day the inner courtyard had been transformed into a theme park for the children. A trampoline had been rented, a cotton-candy machine; someone dressed in a bunny suit was organizing an egg hunt. The little girls wore starched, flouncy dresses, and the boys white jackets and black, clip-on bow ties. The women were dressed up, too, even the ones shackled at the ankle and waist. Deborah photographed all day, nonstop. Identifiable pictures of children would have to be excluded from publication, but people wanted a keepsake. We left before visiting hours ended. It wasn’t our place to be there. It wasn’t really in us to be there.

Subtitled "an investigation," her One Big Self writes and explores the incarcerated individual (and exploring through the text, as opposed to simply writing her results), which through incarceration, replaces the myriad of individualities into a common, maintained and silent single unit. C.D. Wright is one of the few poets writing today who is capable of such enviable lines that you not only wish they could have been yours, but they manage to somehow overtake you before any kind of jealousy can set in. In this collection, Wright has managed poems that bring out the humanity and dehumanizing aspects of women living in the American prison system, and give them back the dignity that, perhaps, even some of them might not have known they already had.

Did you ever have your own room
Did you wet the bed
Did you pour salt on slugs
Did he touch you there
Did you ever make anyone something you were proud of
Can you carry a tune
Do you like okra
Have you ever been scared to the core