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James Wright: Two Moments in Memory
One: Fiesole, 1974
This is the table where we eat our breakfast of panini
and coffee and oranges, and where, after the dishes
are cleared and the girls are off to school and she
is off down the hill to her Italian lessons in the
Via Dante Alighieri, I sit down to read and write.
The only window opens onto the back valley of
Fiesole, the Mugello Valley, where the river twists
like a silver thread through a rumpled fallen cloth.
This morning I am reading in Giorgio Vasari's Lives
of the Artists, the passage where the medieval
master Cimabue discovers the shepherd boy Giotto
sitting on the meadow grass and scratching the faces
of his lambs onto the side of a boulder. Just as
Cimabue is about to touch Giotto's shoulder, the
doorbell jangles and a cry comes up from the street:
"La posta!" In the mail is an
envelope from my friend Michael Heffernan in Kansas
bringing simply a page or two from The Ohio Review,
James Wright's "Lambs on the Boulder,"
where he recalls Cimabue discovering the boy Giotto
sitting on the meadow grass and scratching the faces
of his lambs onto a boulder. Michael has written
across the top of the page: "I thought you'd
like to see this beautiful man." From a great
distance, someone is touching my shoulder.
Two: Whitemarsh Creek,
1974
This is my old friend Sandy Hammer's family
cottage on Whitemarsh Creek in the Chesapeake
backwaters. We are all here together gathering
breakfast. First we drop a few lines in the water off
the little dock and catch handfuls of shivery perch
to fry up with the hotcakes. Then we pick
blackberries off the bush outside the kitchen door
for dessert. The girls are delirious. Dessert after
breakfast! There are two or three hammocks strung
among the tall pines. Full from our breakfast, we
laze in them most of the morning. Then I say to
Hammer the poem "Lying in a Hammock at William
Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." Hammer,
who once sat me down on the floor of a fraternity
house in Chapel Hill and patiently explained to me
the intricacies of Auden's "In Praise of
Limestone," says, "That's not bad for a
poem." He has become a city planner. Later,
thinking of the little fish we caught for breakfast,
I am moved to say the poem called "Northern
Pike," which ends,
"There must be something
very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy."
"Hey," says Hammer, "a poem about
fishing. I could go for that." There is a fresh
breeze in the sails of the boat tied alongside the
dock. In the cattails at the water's edge, redwing
blackbirds dart and flicker and come to rest, showing
us their scarlet epaulets. "All we need
now," I say, "is a James Wright poem about
redwing blackbirds." The next afternoon, in a
library a hundred miles north, I open the new issue
of The Nation, and there it is, a poem by
James Wright called "Redwings." You will
remember it. It is the first poem in To a
Blossoming Pear Tree. Believe this. It will make
you happy, because then you can believe anything.
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