In front of a donut shop someone’s son is shot dead
A witness on condition of anonymity
The slow open vulgar mouth drawing on a cigarette
In a face once called Forever Young
Now to be known as Never-a-Man
Gone to the world of the working and the prevaricating
of the warring world of drywalling of lousy test scores
of fishing from a bridge on a brilliant afternoon
belt buckle blown undone
Recollect reading to her boy
reading to him in bed overcome herself
with sleep as if drugged or slugged then jabbed up again
Come on Keep reading Don’t stop Don’t ever stop
like she was saying Beauty cannot she cannot marry
the Beast and tonight as on all other rose-scented evens
He stumbles the Beast he stumbles from Beauty’s empty chamber
In agony he goes in agony the fur of his fingers
smoking until it’s her boy he is the one saying
exclaiming Yes Yes he will he will marry the Beast
until he is the one who conks out
as a light pole struck by a drunken car
And suddenly it’s raining like plastic
When she stumbles at last from the room
he is the one who shakes himself awake
and yells Protect me and she is the one
who promises exclaiming Yes Yes she will I swear
if it kills me I will as once the mother
of Forever Young shot in front of the donut shop
must have sworn if it killed her she will a boy
So quiet the report heard from his kin
You wouldn’t even notice him on your electric bill
Over there it’s a different world
Desperate to be rejoined to this one
Notes on the Poem
CD Wright's Rising, Falling, Hovering wields much to hold us in its thrall. This excerpt from the title series of poems - each distinct in style and layout - offers stark, unforgettable images and heartrending juxtapositions of tenderness and brutality. It's all rendered with a spaciousness on the page done simply but strikingly with line spacing, and made unsettling and haunting with extended gaps between words. The layout of the poem suggests how the poem might also be read. Even just "read aloud" in our head, the line spacing lends a slow, measured pace to the poem. Coupled with the gaps between words and phrases, though, is the pace measured or, in fact, catatonic? Are the gaps shocked silences, or indicative of a struggle to contain emotion, or to regain composure and one's ability to articulate one's despair and rage? Considering some of the poem's subject matter, do those gaps create a bullet-riddled effect? The space between verses is disquietingly vast, too. While you seek to discern how they're related, the pieces do not touch. That separated, disembodied sense is reinforced by images such as "[t]he slow open vulgar mouth" (not a person), "as a light pole struck by a drunken car" (not a person in sight) and, most vividly, "belt buckle blown undone" (no longer a person attached to it). On this platform of spaces, pauses and gaps, Wright places powerfully contrasting scenes. The soft and precious moments of a mother reading to her child are troublingly bookended by violence: someone shot dead, a car hitting a light pole, even the desperation shading to menace of the Beast in the fairy tale. Is Wright telling us that there is space enough around innocence to buffer the harshness of the world ... or that space is potentially vulnerable and permeable?