If Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning is a twentieth century religious poem, Charles Wright’s Black Zodiac is a twenty-first. Stevens uses blank verse, Wright free. In Stevens the absence of faith is felt as anguish, and much of his poem attempts to ease the anguish by reconciling us to earthly life.

Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

In Wright, the black stars, the stars without divinity, are felt differently. His loose free poetic line already suggests that the sadness hunched in each careful, fraught, emotionally withheld, Stevens line – each measured line – has shaken out into something else entirely. The imperative now is not so much to infuse earthly life with the human divine as it is merely to produce descriptions of the world abandoned by the spirit. Black Zodiac records the contemporary poet recording, finding words adequate to the reality of the world. Rather than the ordinary mind in existential conversation with itself, Wright’s poem features the writer’s mind in conversation with its “masters” – great precursor poets of the cosmos, like Dante.

Darkened by time, the masters, like our memories, mix
And mismatch,
and settle about our lawn furniture, like air
Without a meaning, like air in its clear nothingness.
What can we say to either of them?
How can they be so dark and so clear at the same time?
They ruffle our hair,
they ruffle the leaves of the August trees.
Then stop, abruptly as wind.

You do it too, says Dante; you write the great poetry of the heavens and the earth. He ruffles the poet’s hair like a fond father: You can do it, kid. It’s your turn now. Yet at this late date the grand religious narratives have gotten all mixed up to the point of meaninglessness, leaving us with writer’s block.

Those who look for the Lord will cry out in praise of him.
Perhaps. And perhaps not—
dust and ashes though we are,
Some will go wordlessly…

And maybe those who go wordlessly are the lucky ones. Without their own language, they never really existed, never accepted their embodiment, never felt the weight of the masters’ expectations on them:

… speaking in fear and tongues,
Hating their garments splotched by the flesh.
These are the lucky ones, the shelved ones, the twice-erased.

Dante and John Chrysostom
Might find this afternoon a sidereal roadmap,
A pilgrim’s way …
You might too
Under the prejaundiced outline of the quarter moon,
Clouds sculling downsky like a narrative for whatever comes,
What hasn’t happened to happen yet
Still lurking behind the stars,
31 August 1995 …
The afterlife of insects, space graffiti, white holes
In the landscape,
such things, such avenues, lead to dust
And handle our hurt with ease.
Sky blue, blue of infinity, blue
waters above the earth:
Why do the great stories always exist in the past?

For our masters, any random summer afternoon can tell the heavenly story; for us too, perhaps, the signs of the world – an early moon, contrails, clouds in motion – can generate spiritual narrative… But no. “Such things, such avenues, lead to dust.”

Unanswerable questions, small talk,
Unprovable theorems, long-abandoned arguments—
You’ve got to write it all down.
Landscape or waterscape, light-length on evergreen, dark sidebar
Of evening,
you’ve got to write it down.
Memory’s handkerchief, death’s dream and automobile,
God’s sleep,
you’ve still got to write it down,
Moon half-empty, moon half-full,
Night starless and egoless, night blood-black and prayer-black…

The cosmic scheme might have collapsed, God might have nodded off forever, but you’ve still got to write it down, still got to find words for a silent world without transcendence:

We go to our graves with secondary affections,
Second-hand satisfaction, half-souled,
star charts demagnetized.

These are charming and moving lines; they describe the pathos of spiritually unfulfilled lives, the souls we only, in our short, confused, time, half-fashion, our places in the zodiac simply ripped off the wall when we die. Only our poets can redeem such lives. But how?

Calligraphers of the disembodied, God’s word-wards,
What letters will we illuminate?
Above us, the atmosphere,
The nothing that’s nowhere, signs on, and waits for our beck and call.
Above us, the great constellations sidle and wince,
The letters undarken and come forth,
Your X and my X.
The letters undarken and they come forth.

Our poets script what we were; like monks, they illuminate our lives. Our expressive world waits for them to interpret its expressiveness, “waits for our beck and call.”

Eluders of memory, nocturnal sleep of the greenhouse,
Spirit of slides and silences,
Invisible Hand,
Witness and walk on.

Here the poet directly addresses the masters, telling them to beat it. Walk on. Nothing to see here. The light of the stars has gone black, and if the poet’s going to record that blackness, he’ll need to do it unburdened by those precursors and their expectations. Instead he invokes the smaller, unmasterful spirits of his small world:

Lords of the discontinuous, lords of the little gestures,
Succor my shift and save me …
All afternoon the rain has rained down in the mind,
And in the gardens and dwarf orchard.
All afternoon
The lexicon of late summer has turned its pages
Under the rain,
abstracting the necessary word.
Autumn’s upon us.
The rain fills our narrow beds.
Description’s an element, like air or water.
That’s the word.

My shift: This is my turn, my time and place as a poet, and I’ve got to write it down. The magnificent theologians are of no help to me here in the dwarf orchard; only the lords of little gestures and discontinuous moments will be of use. The precursor poets who matter now are people precisely like Wallace Stevens (the line about description as an element is taken from a Stevens poem), adepts of contingency. Necessity now is about finding the necessary word, abstracting it from the seasons of an always-immanent world, and writing it down.

The final line of Wright’s poem – “That’s the word.” – echoes the Liturgy of the Word at mass, when the New Testament reading concludes: The word of the Lord.