Carolyne Wright
Carolyne Wright has published four books and four chapbooks of poetry, three
volumes translated from Spanish and Bengali, and a collection of essays. Her new
collection is A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006), finalist for the
Idaho Prize and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of
America.
Her previous book Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Eastern
Washington UP/Lynx House Books), which won the Blue Lynx Prize and an American
Book Award, has just appeared in a second edition.
Wright is working on an
investigative memoir of her experiences in Chile during the presidency of
Salvador Allende., The Road to Isla Negra, which received the PEN/Jerard
Fund Award and the Crossing Boundaries Award. She spent four years on
fellowships in Kolkata, India, and Dhaka, Bangladesh, translating the work of
Bengali women poets and writers.
Wright has recently returned to her native
Seattle, where she is on the faculties of the Whidbey Writers’ Workshop MFA
Program and Seattle’s Richard Hugo House. She serves on the Board of Directors
of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and as Translation
Editor of Artful Dodge.
Last Dream in Perú
Lake Titicaca
It was my job
to mimic the crane’s cry
as my friends and I skiffed
through the estuary reeds.
But how could I, unless my life
beat in the heart of the bird
and looked through his eye?
My own name was all
I could call.
As they rowed, my friends told me
how, under the floors of their cabins,
they’d excavated old stone walls
whose joints were still
as mortarless and smooth as faces
without memories or dreams.
All I meant to say went quiet.
Real cranes cried
above the thin wind.
It was time to turn back
to land. Before we reached
the shore, I’d have to find
an opening in the water
that fit my speech,
and whisper my name in it
before the lake closed over
and sank it like a stone.
from A Change of Maps
A Change of Maps
“More delicate than the
historians’
are the map-makers’ colors.”
—Elizabeth Bishop
Early fall looks both ways
into the year—how we will outsmart
the distance. Behind us, our childhoods
wave goodbye in the rear-view mirror.
We look ahead, down avenues
of poplars whose buried pasts reflect
in limbs that take root in the water.
Where we are going: the X factor,
unguessed as the gaps between wavelengths.
Our maps: not the Triple A’s
network of routes, its field guides
to speed traps and warm weather;
but navigation charts, parchment
rough as Magellan’s reckoning.
Blank seas and terrae incognitae.
Coastlines wandering off in fanciful
directions, peninsulas bulging
wrongly as anatomically
impossible limbs. The mapmakers’
crabbed Latin can’t explain
how such charts voyaged into the New World
of our luggage. Magic, we say,
armchair pilgrims, turning page
after page of color-coded nations,
asking no questions of our whereabouts.
Above us, satellites measure the drift
of continents, dissolving vows
of bedrock, offshore shelves conceding
all their striations to the sea.
They track the moon’s loosening orbit,
explorer shuttles homing in
with batteries of data, micro-
chips shrinking our wildest dreams.
We roll up the old cartographies,
coordinates overlaid with newer,
more transparent certainties
in the subatomic shadows’ glare.
Where now? we want to know of landscape—
houses and poplars and children the maps
and master planners have no idea of.
Our arrival will coincide with the true
colors of our going. We look
both ways for distances that shift
their bearings in our favor.
from A Change of
Maps
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