In Praise of What Is Missing

When a tooth is extracted,
                                     some side of the holy wheel is unnotched,
And twists, unlike Ixion's, in the wind and weather,
And one slips into wanting nothing more
                                                         from the human world,
And leans back, a drifting cloud,
Toward what becomes vacant and is nameless and is blue,
As days once were, and will be again.

By Charles Wright
Recipient of the 2009 Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
from Sestets by Charles Wright.
Copyright © 2009 by Charles Wright.