Chickamauga

by Charles Wright

Dove-twirl in the tall grass.
End-of-summer glaze next door
On the gloves and split ends of the conked magnolia tree.
Work sounds: truck back-up-beep, wood
tin-hammer, cicada, fire horn.
History handles our past like spoiled fruit.
Mid-morning, late-century light
calicoed under the peach trees.
Fingers us here. Fingers us here and here.
The poem is a code with no message:
The point of the mask is not the mask but
the face underneath,
Absolute, incommunicado,
unhoused and peregrine.
The gill net of history will pluck us soon enough
From the cold waters of self-contentment
we drift in
One by one
into its suffocating light and air.
Structure becomes an element of belief,
syntax
And grammar a catechist,
Their words what the beads say,
words thumbed to our discontent.

Analytical Paragraph of Chickamauga
by Dennis Gugger

The famous poem “Chickamauga” by Charles Wright describes the wisdom behind poetry; there is more to a poem than just the words. The author begins “Chickamauga” with a character that is on the countryside and enjoying the nature around him. Slowly Charles Wright explains what is hidden in the poems. He discusses about how the grammar and the structure are crucial in a well-written poem. A poem is very much like a mask, once you have figured out who the character underneath the mask is, you have figured out what the poem is about. Wright uses a metaphor comparing a mask and a poem, “The point of the mask is not the mask but/ the face underneath”. Wright uses many comparisons like the words as beads to get us to figure out the overall message of the poem. Wright creates very good imagery to help us see what poems are really about. The many metaphors that Charles Wright uses helps us see that a poem is often like many other objects. Charles Wright is changing many peoples’ view of poems with his great imagery and wide sense of vocabulary.