Jay Wright > Quotes

“love will go down as
the fear of divination,
or the source of continuity
within divinity.”
― Jay Wright, The Presentable Art of Reading Absence

“We could go up to the top of the hill,
and restructure our entrance,
do away
with the contradiction of being
nowhere but here,
the assumed proportion of a presence
that will always escape,
of being nowhere
but near
the presumed indifference
that solicits our wakefulness.
Day begins
its indiscreet translation
once again,
flowing through the pearl white of loss,
or the indelible deep blue
of fractured words.
Remove emptiness.
Replace nothing.”
― Jay Wright, The Presentable Art of Reading Absence

“You are always
in the beginning
of some prophecy
that you will not believe
to save your life.

You travel in cities
that travel in you,
lost in the ache
of knowing none.”
― Jay Wright, Transfigurations: Collected Poems

“Light's Interrupted Amplitude


All summer connotations fill this light,

a symmetry of different scales—the site

of fibrous silence, the velvet lace

of iris, alders the moon can ignite.

One feels the amplitude of grief, the pace

of oscillating stars, power in place

where time has crossed and left a breathy stain.

A body needs the weight and thrust of grace.

I want to parse the logic, spin and domain,

the structure mourning will allow, the grain

of certainty in two estates, the dance

of perfect order, flowing toward its plane.

That bird you see has caught a proper stance,

unfaithful to its measure, a pert mischance

of divination on the move, the trace

of sacred darkness true to light's advance.”
― Jay Wright, The Guide Signs: Book One and Book Two

“This body feels chambered by all
that has escaped
a constellation of intent,
only, perhaps,
the brightest intent of a star,
a piping fish, endangered
by troubled air.
From breath to breath,
the world is disfigured,
reconstructed,
let go.”
― Jay Wright, The Presentable Art of Reading Absence

“These spires above my house are doves,
lifted by grace above the earth's eruption.”
― Jay Wright, Transfigurations: Collected Poems

“This morning chases a scattered rhyme;
this moment flows toward its ambivalent source.”
― Jay Wright, The Presentable Art of Reading Absence

“What voice have I borrowed
to express a necessary silence?”
― Jay Wright, The Presentable Art of Reading Absence

“Pauline Trio

One could sing October rain,
and one had a gift for plain
chant and prayer, a domain
unsettled by love or its
intimate other. What fits

with this theology no
one dares to say. These twins so
perfectly in tune must know
"the modesty of nature,"
the perfect art and texture

that sustains the other name.
Paris could not be the frame
for loyal Romans, their shame
worn upon their bodies light
as air, and nothing is quite

as endurable as death.
Those who have taken this path
move with an abiding breath.
Such a common dance this dense
intention of love's expense.

Keep this for that special hour
when the Roman drops his sour
gift for abandoned splendour;
et c'est la nuit, the footfall
that troubles that other Paul.


I have learned the felicity of fire,
how in its wake
something picks at buried seed.
Think this a most festive deed,
nature's mistake,
borrowed flare of a village dance, satire
of the sun's course, light you read
through waste, repair. Death had freed
that first opaque
habitation (what a widening gyre),
an aspen ache,
a lustrous scar that might lead
to a hidden grove, or breed
astonishment in its loss; all entire,
a shaping breath proposes its own pyre.

Solitude guides me
through this minor
occasion;
moon is my mentor,
one on a spree.
This notion,
night's philanthropy,
courts my favor.
Devotion,
love's predecessor,
sings its tidy
discretion.
Such gentility
reins all vigor,
all caution.”
― Jay Wright

“I am solid.
I am the measure of the house.
I sleep with my grainy eyes
plucking the shadows from the room.”
― Jay Wright, Transfigurations: Collected Poems

“I have been a faithful son of the abyss,
one who curdles when my drum calls.
My singing is a coarse cloth on a desert floor.”
― Jay Wright, Elaine's Book