Excerpt from BODY AND SOUL    by Charles Wright

 

(for Coleman Hawkins)

I used to think the power of words was inexhaustible,
That how we said the world
            was how it was, and how it would be.
I used to imagine that word-sway and word-thunder
Would silence the Silence and all that,
That worlds were the Word,
That language could lead us inexplicably to grace,
As though it were geographical.
I used to think these things when I was young.
            I still do.

"Body and Soul” from “A Short History of the Shadow” 

by Charles Wright, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux