Poem by Charles Wright

Last Supper

I seem to have come to the end of something, but don’t know what,
Full moon blood orange just over the top of the redbud tree.
Maundy Thursday tomorrow,

then Good Friday, then Easter in full drag,

Dogwood blossoms like little crosses
All down the street,

lilies and jonquils bowing their mitred heads.

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Perhaps it’s a sentimentality about such fey things,
But I don’t think so. One knows
There is no end to the other world,

In the event, a reliquary evening for sure,
The bones in their tiny boxes, rosettes under glass.

no matter where it is.

Or maybe it’s just the way the snow fell

So white on the white snowdrops.
As our fathers were bold to tell us,

a couple of days ago,

Spring in its starched bib,
Winter’s cutlery in its hands. Cold grace. Slice and fork.

it’s either eat or be eaten.

Charles Wright, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2002, is Souder Family Professor of
English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and the author of many books of poetry,
including “Country Music: Selected Early Poems” (1982), which won the National Book Award,
and “Black Zodiac” (1997), which received the Pulitzer Prize. He has also published two works of
criticism, “Halflife” (1983) and “Quarter Notes” (1995). In 1999 he was elected a Chancellor of the
Academy of American Poets. This poem will appear in “Scar Tissue” in the spring of 2006.

Dædalus Winter 2006

115

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