only the crossing counts
by C.D. Wright
It’s not how we leave one’s life. How go off
the air. You never know do you. You think you’re ready
for anything; then it happens, and you’re not. You’re really
not. The genesis of an ending, nothing
but a feeling, a slow movement, the dusting
of furniture with a remnant of the revenant’s shirt.
Seeing the candles sink in their sockets; we turn
away, yet the music never quits. The fire kisses our face.
O phthsis, o lotharian dead eye, no longer
will you gaze on the baize of the billiard table. No more
shooting butter dishes out of the sky. Scattering light.
Between snatches of poetry and penitence you left
the brumal wood of men and women. Snow drove
the butterflies home. You must know
how it goes, known all along what to expect,
sooner or later … the faded cadence of anonymity.
Frankly, my dear, frankly, my dear, frankly
Posts in this series (The Cemetery Series, subset of Clear Out the Jam Jars Series) are not supposed to be long, but I really did not understand this poem the first six times I read it, and so I worked my way through it like a detective to find out what the heck it meant, which I ‘m also not supposed to be doing because A poem should not mean/ But be.
So sue me, I discovered some things.
I started with the words I didn’t know: phthis, lotharian, brumal. Phthsis is an eye no longer working. Lotharian I take to mean belonging to a Lothario, a man with a roving eye. Unfortunately now with a dead-eye.
A portrait of the person who died starts to take shape, a ladies man, a person so alive he scattered light, a person who found life had grown dark, the brumal (having to do with winter) wood of men and women banishing the butterflies. A person who wrote poetry, a person who shot pool and skeet, and died suddenly, unexpectedly—by suicide? By gunshot?
Ah, got it. The final line (which the first six times sounded like Rhett Butler popped in the poem on his way out of Atlanta)
Frankly, my dear, frankly, my dear, frankly
now made sense. “only the crossing counts” is about poet Frank Stanford, C.D. Wright’s old lover. That was probably immediately obvious to anyone faintly familiar with C.D. Wright’s life. Just took me longer.
Frank Stanford shot himself in a bedroom while Wright was in the front of the house with Stanford’s wife. The death was sudden, it was horrific (and a crazy story, link here for more details). The first line
It’s not how we leave one’s life
sounds like someone grieving a suicide who’s trying to forget the circumstances of the suicide. Later she wonders if at some level she always knew it would happen–
the dusting
of furniture with a remnant of the revenant’s shirt.
That line just blows me away. This poem blows me away. It’s just so thick. Read it again. Read it six times, seven times. You’ll keep finding more.
C.D. Wright passed last year. I’ll reprint her bio from an earlier post.
C.D. Wright was born in 1949 in the southern Ozarks of Arkansas. She and her brother were the children of a judge and a court reporter. So it’s no wonder that after studying French at Memphis State University, she considered becoming a lawyer. Fortunately for the world of poetry, she left law school after a brief stint and went on to get her MFA from University of Arkansas.
Poet Frank Stanford’s press, Lost Roads, published her first book of poetry. She took over the press after he killed himself. Strange that Frank Stanford, whom she knew well, was supposed to be the next big thing, but it ended up that she, the less flamboyant one, the steadier person, is now heralded as a true American original, in a “a school of exactly one” (from poet Joel Brouwer, as quoted in the New York Times).
Of her original sytle, Wright said this in an interview with Jacket Magazine in 2001:
As to my own aesthetic associations / affiliations / sympathies: I have never belonged to a notable element of writers who identified with one another partly because I come from Arkansas, specifically that part of Arkansas known for its resistance-to-joining, a non-urban environment where readily identifiable groups and sub-groups are less likely to form. The last known poetry clan in my part of the country was the Agrarians. I was not of that generation, gender or class.
She married poet Forest Gander. Together they had a son Brecht and ran Lost Roads. She taught at Brown University and published over a dozen books, one of them a collaboration with a photographer to document the lives of women in prison.
She was awarded a MacArthur Fellow and Guggenheim fellowship.
She died January 12 at age 67 in her sleep of a blod clot.
