The pentatonic spring washes its winter clothes.Five is a difficult color—not this green of reflected sky, nor the redclamor of midnight riding by on a church bell.Think of the Greek of it,an Egyptian river,the dry desert voice you hear in the cleansing.All before this moment found its own measure,an ingenious inganno, a blessureoccasioned by a consonant’s turmoil,a Germanic algebra brightly a-boilthrough all the strings, a fortspinning always pure,always a public shrine to a wood securein its origin. White is a difficultsound in the edowa above the tumultfastened to the soul of widows, magnitudethat arms the darkest nebula. The rudedead awaken to another baptism.
[The pentatonic spring washes its winter clothes.]
Jay Wright
Feature Date
- December 9, 2023
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“[The pentatonic spring washes its winter clothes.]” from POSTAGE STAMPS: by Jay Wright.
Published by Flood Editions on November 20, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Jay Wright.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jay Wright was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1934 and spent his teens in San Pedro, California, where his father worked in the shipyards. After graduating from high school, he played for two minor-league ball clubs—Mexicali and Fresno—and spent a minute in spring training with the San Diego Padres of the old Pacific Coast League. He then served three years in the army, stationed in Germany. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, he received his B.A. in comparative literature from the University of California (Berkeley) and his M.A. from Rutgers University (New Brunswick). A jazz and música Latina bassist, he lives in Bradford, Vermont.
Wright is the author of sixteen previous books of poetry, and he has written more than forty plays and a dozen essays. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry.
An inventive new collection from the acclaimed African-American poet Jay Wright.
In Postage Stamps, Jay Wright continues his lifelong exploration as a sojourner, a pilgrim, the “homo viator,” who speaks through and by an embellishment of a constantly changing movement to discover the incomplete sense and measure, the temporal invention of all relation, the soul in flight.
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