Earlier Poems
Page 1
ALSO BY FRANZ WRIGHT
Poetry
God's Silence (2006)
Walking to Martha's Vineyard (2003)
The Beforelife (2001)
III Lit (1998)
Rorschach Test (1995)
The Night World & the Word Night (1993)
Entry in an Unknown Hand (1989)
The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes (1982)
The Earth Without You (1980)
Translations
The Unknown Rilke: Expanded Edition (1991)
No Siege Is Absolute: Versions of Rene Char (1984)
The Unknown Rilke (1983)
The Life of Mary (poems by Rainer Maria Rilke) (1981)
Jarmila. Flies: 10 Prose Poems (by Erica Pedretti) (1976)
Pain passes for sunlight at some depths.
—BILL KNOTT
CONTENTS
The One Whose Eyes Open
When You Close Your Eyes
{1982}
In the Reading Room
Asking for My Younger Brother
My Brother Takes a Hammer to the Mirror
Nocturne
Trespassing on Highway 58: For Two Voices
Dream of Snow: Los Angeles
Arriving in the City
From Rene Char
Waking on the Mountain Facing Mount Konocti
The Earth Will Come Back from the Dead
Seeing Alone
Blood
Old Bottle Found in the Cellar of an Abandoned Farmhouse
Knife
Mosquitoes
Trakl
The Sniper
The Wedding
The Visit
Drinking Back
Initial
The Wish
Hand
The Solitude
Brugge
Morning
The Road
Those Who Come Back
The Old
Brussels, 1971
St. Paul's Greek Orthodox Church, Minneapolis, 1960
Poem with No Speaker
Last Poem
The Brother
Autumn on West Lorain Street
View from an Institution
To Her
In Memory: 1980
The Journey
Home
I Did Not Notice
Lower East Side Dawn
After
Entry in an Unknown Hand
{1989}
I
Untitled
Winter: Twilight & Dawn
Rooms
The Crawdad
Joseph Come Back as the Dusk (1950-1982)
Quandary
To the Hawk
Audience
Alcohol
At the End of the Untraveled Road
II
Vermont Cemetery
Morning Arrives
North Country Entries
Birthday
The Note
The Talk
Ill Lit
Word from Home
Entry in an Unknown Hand
Duration
III
No Longer or Not Yet
IV
Look into Its Eyes
Biography
The Day
Night Writing
There
Poem
A Day Comes
Three Discarded Fragments
The Street
My Work
Coordinates
Waiting Up
Guests
Winter Entries
Going North in Winter
The Night World & the Word Night
{1993}
Illegibility
Occurrence
Pawtucket Postcards
Provincetown Postcards
Loneliness
Words
Forgotten in an Old Notebook
Gone
After Rimbaud
Certain Tall Buildings
August Insomnia
Jamais Vu
Night Said
The World
The Forties
Untitled
The Lovers
Untitled
Say My Name
For Martha
For a Friend Who Disappeared
Untitled
Time to Stop Keeping a Dream Journal
Lament
Midnight Postscript
The Winter Skyline Late
Clearlake Oaks (I)
Clearlake Oaks (II)
Mercy
The Drunk
The Angel (I)
The Angel (II)
The Angel (III)
Theory
The Door
Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse
Before the Storm
Tidepool: Elk, California
Untitled
Elegy: Breece D'J Pancake
The Spider
Bild, 1959
Whispered Ceremony
Train Notes
Rorschach Test
{1995}
Voice
Infant Sea Turtles
The Comedian
Heaven
One in the Afternoon
Beginning of November
The Meeting
Late Late Show
Heroin
Rorschach Test
Reunion
Depiction of Childhood
Night Watering
Planes
The Weeping
Untitled
The Family's Windy Summer Night
The Leaves
Ending
The Mailman
Twelve Camellia Texts
The Blizzard
Mental Illness
Poem in Three Parts
The Face
Depiction of a Dream (I)
Depiction of a Dream (II)
New Leaves Bursting into Green Flames
The Lord's Prayer
Where You Are
Untitled
Black Box
Church of the Strangers
To the Poet
The Lemon Grove
Observations
Van Gogh's Undergrowth with Two Figures
To a Book
The Disappearing
Place
A Place to Be
Boy Leaving Home
Acknowledgments
The One
Whose Eyes Open
When You Close
Your Eyes
{1982}
In the Reading Room
Since I last looked up
from my book,
another appeared in the room
seated at the long table across from me
under the window,
bathed in gray light.
I don't think he has come
to reflect on the lyrics of Verlaine.
The one who with tremendous effort lifts his head
and stares straight at me, and sees nothing;
the one who suddenly gets to his feet
as though his name had been announced.
So far so good, no one has noticed.
Below the readers' faces,
set now in the impenetrable
cast of people sleeping,
pages go on turning
in the silence, so much snow
falling into a grave.
The one with head bent, eyelids closed,
looking at his hands.
Asking for My Younger Brother
I never did find you.
I later heard how you'd wandered the streets
for weeks, washing dishes before you got fired;
taking occasional meals at the Salvation Army
with the other diagnosed. How on one parti
cular ni
you won four hundred dollars at cards:
how some men followed you and beat you up,
leaving you unconscious in an alley
where you were wakened by police
and arrested for vagrancy, for being tired
of getting beaten up at home.
I'd dreamed you were dead,
and started to cry.
I couldn't exactly phone Dad.
I bought a pint of bourbon
and asked for you all afternoon in a blizzard.
In Hell
Dante had words with the dead,
although
they had no bodies
and he could not touch them, nor they him.
A man behind the ticket counter
in the Greyhound terminal
pointed to one of the empty seats, where
someone who looked like me sometimes sat down
among the people waiting to depart.
I don't know why I write this.
With it comes the irrepressible desire
to write nothing, to remember nothing;
there is even the desire
to walk out in some field and bury it
along with all my other so-called
poems, which help no one—
where each word will blur
into earth finally,
where the mind that voiced them
and the hand that took them down will.
So what. I left
the bus fare back
to Sacramento with this man,
and asked him
to give it to you.
Reno, Nevada
My Brother Takes a Hammer to the Mirror
{in memory of Thomas James}
One in the morning: my brother
appears at the back door.
It opens.
Lights are on.
No one is home. The murdered
eyes look in
the bathroom mirror:
It was raining when they buried me;
I traveled, I fell ill.
I can't recall shooting myself
in the head.
Have I said it
before?
It was raining.
He switches the lights off.
All windows are dark
on the block where he stands now,
the stars blazing on
the closed lips
pronouncing these words.
Have I said it before: night
arrives sowing
the mirrors in black rooms with the stars.
Have I said it before?
I estrange.
Light is someone.
Father?
Nocturne
I am the black moon, the blank page, the field
where they dug up
the blindfolded skull.
Think of the roots'
thin fingers
drawn so slowly, slowly
as the growth of hair through
utter darkness
to drink—
that is me.
I am the shade trees growing near graves cast,
the cellar door you have to open
like a huge book,
the bird in the ditch, its beak
slightly parted.
Sober, irreproachably dressed
in a black suit
or with long-unwashed clothes,
the damaged nails,
I come, the representative
of my own nonexistence.
I arrive with my eyes
of the five-year-old child
in a wheelchair, the light
from two stars
dead for a thousand years;
I arrive
with my voice
of the telephone ringing
in an empty phone booth
on Main Street, after midnight
in the rain.
Trespassing on Highway 58: For Two Voices
Horses stand asleep
White shadows cast in at their feet
It's here that I saw you last fall
Lost in thought huge heads
For one second
Turn as I pass between stalls
These vast barns house also
The owl and the moth
My nostrils dilated in shock
The needling mosquito
Galloping rats
Here I saw you
The drinker comes here
Furtive sighs
Float down from lofts
Propped up with your back
To a wall
A single rope hangs From a beam
Your legs
Partly covered in straw
The spokes of the moon roll across the broad floorboards
A light wind stirred
In the six-feet-tall corn
Your forgotten face follows me back down the road
Dream of Snow: Los Angeles
Toward the end of November
I dreamed that it snowed here
I dreamed that I rose from
the couch
where I had been napping
for weeks
with the lights on
I went to the window
*
As a child
in Minneapolis
I was warned at school
not to eat the snow
As a child
I was drilled
to get my ass up
and my head down
under the desk
where it would be safe
when the glass shattered
It says in the newspaper
airports are snowbound
all over the country
A girl in Nebraska is found
in a field
frozen to death in her nightgown
It will be 80 degrees
*
And I
will close my eyes now
and lean back in this chair
and watch the snow
blowing in from the north
over the freeways
over the emptied suburbs
over the gray waves
over the graves of the skyline
over the university over the Mercedes-filled parking lots
of the pale physicists far from you
Arriving in the City
In the loose-fitting hospital gown,
holding a juglike container of blood
like a lantern,
the vein of a clear plastic tube running out of it
up one baggy sleeve, disheveled and pale, you approached
down the aisle: on the night Greyhound
somewhere between New York City and Cleveland,
I abruptly woke up
with the distinct impression I'd screamed,
the one seated next to me still
fast asleep—I am walking
alone down Third Avenue now—those around me
all still fast asleep.
I find the address—it is on one
of those unlighted, unfrequented side streets
that are like passages
marked in a book
for undiscernible reasons.
The light is on.
I look up in the dark
faintly luminous blue hall of sky
between the walls
of locked warehouses.
Incontrovertibly,
the light is on.
I look up in the moon,
bathing the bones of my face in the cold
of that gray immaterial city
inhabited by eyeless millions, gazing
interminably at the world.
From Rene Char
To quiet you the poet
Places to his lips
A finger
Whose nail is torn off
*
Often I speak
Only to you
So the earth<
br />
Will forget me
*
The peace of dusk
Moves over each stone
Dropping
The anchor of grief
*
With complete sobriety I remain
The mother
Of distant cradles
*
Lightning and blood
I learned
Are one
I
Who never walk
But swim and soar
Inside you
*
My future life
Is your face when you sleep
Waking on the Mountain Facing Mount Konocti
If I looked long enough at my hand,
in time
I might picture fine hairlike roots
twining around its fingers. If
I stared long enough,
I could see to the bones—
or with a cold incandescence the bones would start shining.
But I have looked up,
my face ten years older
since I first spent the night here,
and nothing has changed:
over the forehead of Mount Konocti
the last stars are already fading, forgotten.
The hawks' wings catch light, miles above, from the edge
of this world's personal star
minutes before
it reaches my eyelids, which I want closed now
in the chilly wind
that comes as the moon sets.
There is still time.
There is time, and I can still open them
if I wish.
The Earth Will Come Back from the Dead
Down empty roads gray with rain;
through branches
of new leaves then still
more light than leaf;
from turning alone, unperceived, with its sleeping, the wind
the transfiguring wind
in their leaves …
from turning, slowly
turning, turning
green
when everyone is gone.
Seeing Alone
Seeing alone
was a door
I walked through
into a higher
and more affectionate
world, dim trees I come upon walking here
presenceless
rustling invisibly
rustling
Blood
My blood sits upright in a chair
its only thought, breath.
Though I walk around vacant,
inconsolable,
somebody's still breathing in me.
Mute, deaf, and blind
yes—but someone
is still breathing
in me: the blood
which rustles and sleeps.
The suicide in me
(the murderer).
The dreamer, the unborn.
But when I cut myself
I have to say:
This is my blood shed
for no one in particular.
If I get a nosebleed