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Littlefoot: A Poem
After the end of something, there comes another end,
This one behind you, and far away.
Only a lifetime can get you to it,
and then just barely.
Littlefoot , the eighteenth book from one of this country's most acclaimed poets, is an extended meditation on mortality, on the narrator's search of the skies for a road map and for last instructions on "the other side of my own death." Following the course of one year, the poet's seventieth, we witness the seasons change over his familiar postage stamps of soil, realizing that we are reflected in them, that the true affinity is between writer and subject, human and nature, one becoming the other, as the river is like our blood, "it powers on, / out of sight, out of mind." Seeded with lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, here we meet solitude, resignation, and a glad cry that while a return to the beloved earth is impossible, "all things come from splendor," and the urgent question that the poet can't help but "Will you miss me when I'm gone?
This one behind you, and far away.
Only a lifetime can get you to it,
and then just barely.
Littlefoot , the eighteenth book from one of this country's most acclaimed poets, is an extended meditation on mortality, on the narrator's search of the skies for a road map and for last instructions on "the other side of my own death." Following the course of one year, the poet's seventieth, we witness the seasons change over his familiar postage stamps of soil, realizing that we are reflected in them, that the true affinity is between writer and subject, human and nature, one becoming the other, as the river is like our blood, "it powers on, / out of sight, out of mind." Seeded with lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, here we meet solitude, resignation, and a glad cry that while a return to the beloved earth is impossible, "all things come from splendor," and the urgent question that the poet can't help but "Will you miss me when I'm gone?
- GenresPoetry
91 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
4 people are currently reading
84 people want to read
About the author
Charles Wright
246 books110 followersCharles Wright is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac.
From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States. Charles Wright is often ranked as one of the best American poets of his generation. He attended Davidson College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he also served four years in the U.S. Army, and it was while stationed in Italy that Wright began to read and write poetry. He is the author of over 20 books of poetry.
Charles Wright is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His many collections of poetry and numerous awards—including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—have proven that he is, as Jay Parini once said, “among the best poets” of his generation. Yet Wright remains stoic about such achievements: it is not the poet, but the poems, as he concluded to Genoways. “One wants one’s work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author.”
From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States. Charles Wright is often ranked as one of the best American poets of his generation. He attended Davidson College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he also served four years in the U.S. Army, and it was while stationed in Italy that Wright began to read and write poetry. He is the author of over 20 books of poetry.
Charles Wright is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His many collections of poetry and numerous awards—including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—have proven that he is, as Jay Parini once said, “among the best poets” of his generation. Yet Wright remains stoic about such achievements: it is not the poet, but the poems, as he concluded to Genoways. “One wants one’s work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author.”
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 11, 2013
took me awhile to catch on to this book. at first i wondered why i was wasting so much time reading lyric imagery from someone else's life, but once i started reading it as an attempt to collect all the images of an individual life, catalog all experience from a single perspective, i started appreciating it as that. i guess that's all poetry can really be, after all.
October 22, 2008
Powerful meditation on the aging poet. Will the landscape, like the line, come to an end? Or will it flow off of the page and on forever?
September 4, 2014
"The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride."
Whatever your ride."
August 30, 2020
This book is dedicate to my friend in ekphrasis, Robert Denham. Fabulous 35-part, 80-page poem in free-verse. Very reminiscent of Theodore Roethke's poem, "Meditation at Oyster River." Meditation but with the occasional insinuation of the first-person speaker to ground the layers of imagery. So many "poems" that I read in workshop or for a magazine that I edit aren't poems at all. Read this poem, people, this is a real POEM.
Read
December 31, 2025Idk what happened it was really beautiful but I just lost steam
October 17, 2007
From Littlefoot
Part of 27
The logo is Fra Angelico,
alone in the unfinished rooms
Upstairs in S. Marco, blank windows
He colored with apparitions and visitations,
The outlines already there,
Apparently, waiting to be filled in.
And he filled them, stroke by stroke,
Bringing the outside inside.
He painted, it's been said, the first recognizable landscape.
As for the others,
he gathered the form from the air, and gave it flesh.
__________
The snipe stands on top of himself
on the water beneath him.
When he drinks, he drinks from his own mouth.
What could be luckier, as full of grace and replenishment,
As feeding oneself on one's other self, one's stand-in,
Life's little helper swagged under our feet,
one's doppelganger and replica?
Windless, just-August evening.
Only the grasses move, and slightly,
The tall grasses, hearing the whispers of gravity,
And turning their tired necks
as though they'd prefer not to.
Otherwise, not even the stubbed clover moves, nor the snipe,
either of them.
__________
August, blue mother, is calling her children in
soundlessly
Out of the sun-dried thistles
And out of the morning's dewlessness.
All of the little ones,
the hard-backed and flimsy-winged,
The many-legged and short-of-breath,
She calls them all, and they come.
Listen, this time I think she's calling your name as well.
__________
I wish I remembered the way the stars looked
up here some thirty-five years ago
When the lights went out.
Pretty much as they do now, I'd guess,
Though I never see them,
given, as now I am, to an early bed.
Original oxymorons, ice on fire, I loved to watch them fall.
And loved them, too, as they stayed in place,
Designs from the afterlife of dreams,
and beyond that,
Connecting the dots of nothingness.
It comforts me to know they're up there,
and that their light
Keeps coming long after my sleep has gone forth, and my sleep's sleep.
__________
We've all lead raucous lives,
some of them inside, some of them out.
But only the poem you leave behind is what's important.
Everyone knows this.
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride.
Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read.
Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times
His own weight a day just to stay alive.
Now that's a life on the edge.
__________
I live here accompanied by clouds
Now that the weather's broken.
They take and release sunlight
like stained glass outside my small window.
A light that sometimes prompts me to want
To leave the world and settle, like some white bird,
on another mountain.
Part of 27
The logo is Fra Angelico,
alone in the unfinished rooms
Upstairs in S. Marco, blank windows
He colored with apparitions and visitations,
The outlines already there,
Apparently, waiting to be filled in.
And he filled them, stroke by stroke,
Bringing the outside inside.
He painted, it's been said, the first recognizable landscape.
As for the others,
he gathered the form from the air, and gave it flesh.
__________
The snipe stands on top of himself
on the water beneath him.
When he drinks, he drinks from his own mouth.
What could be luckier, as full of grace and replenishment,
As feeding oneself on one's other self, one's stand-in,
Life's little helper swagged under our feet,
one's doppelganger and replica?
Windless, just-August evening.
Only the grasses move, and slightly,
The tall grasses, hearing the whispers of gravity,
And turning their tired necks
as though they'd prefer not to.
Otherwise, not even the stubbed clover moves, nor the snipe,
either of them.
__________
August, blue mother, is calling her children in
soundlessly
Out of the sun-dried thistles
And out of the morning's dewlessness.
All of the little ones,
the hard-backed and flimsy-winged,
The many-legged and short-of-breath,
She calls them all, and they come.
Listen, this time I think she's calling your name as well.
__________
I wish I remembered the way the stars looked
up here some thirty-five years ago
When the lights went out.
Pretty much as they do now, I'd guess,
Though I never see them,
given, as now I am, to an early bed.
Original oxymorons, ice on fire, I loved to watch them fall.
And loved them, too, as they stayed in place,
Designs from the afterlife of dreams,
and beyond that,
Connecting the dots of nothingness.
It comforts me to know they're up there,
and that their light
Keeps coming long after my sleep has gone forth, and my sleep's sleep.
__________
We've all lead raucous lives,
some of them inside, some of them out.
But only the poem you leave behind is what's important.
Everyone knows this.
The voyage into the interior is all that matters,
Whatever your ride.
Sometimes I can't sit still for all the asininities I read.
Give me the hummingbird, who has to eat sixty times
His own weight a day just to stay alive.
Now that's a life on the edge.
__________
I live here accompanied by clouds
Now that the weather's broken.
They take and release sunlight
like stained glass outside my small window.
A light that sometimes prompts me to want
To leave the world and settle, like some white bird,
on another mountain.
January 9, 2008
My first introduction to poetic-powerhouse Charles Wright... I read Littlefoot for a class, and found myself compelled despite the fact that I am not, for the moment, reflecting to much on my age, my old-age, my death, or death in general. (Which is good, I think, for a girl in her early twenties.) Still, the power of Wright's rhetoric, his balance between concrete images and intangible philosophical ideas, managed to maintain my interest throughout, and my copy is now covered with underlines and notes in the margins. I grow a little weary of his naturalistic images at times, but that has more to do with the numerous poets who have tried those images before him with far less success than it does with any failure of Wright's. I expect I'll return to this one, in time.
January 25, 2009
My first Wright, and it was a pretty good one. I'm pressed for time as far as reviewing it, but I'll just say I liked Wright's use of geography (Appalachia -- which has an appeal to me), as well as song (Ralph Stanley, A.P Carter, bluegrass), and psalm. In other words, the echoes Wright incorporates into the poem (and it's one long poem on approaching mortality), do not overpower it. This takes a deft touch, and Wright delivers. From beginning to end, it is always the poet's song that the reader hears, even with its old-timey chorus.
March 31, 2013
In paperback now?
February 7, 2009
...seasons, love, death, and God... I just love this!
Want to read
October 29, 2010in american hybrid
April 23, 2017
The poems in this book by Charles made me love poetry even more. His poems were very descriptive and inspired me to continue to write my poetry as well. I have a list of some of my favourite poetry books, and Little Foot has definitely made the list.💕
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews