Earlier Poems

by Franz Wright

  I had let myself in;

  I'd sat down in your chair.

  I could just see you reading late

  in the soft lamplight—

  looking at a page,

  listening to its voice:

  yellow light shed in circles, in stillness,

  all about your hair.

  Ill Lit

  Leaves stir overhead;

  I write what I'm given to write.

  The extension cord to the black house.

  Word from Home

  Then I went out among the dead

  a pint of whiskey in my head

  and lay on a mound

  covered with snow,

  and closing my eyes to the blowing snow

  looked into his face.

  Smiling and wincing,

  reading his shoes,

  holding out a ruined hand;

  wishing for a way to disappear—

  all the poor formalities of the mad.

  As if I had met him years later,

  an accident—something is wrong with his face.

  Thinner, perhaps, the eyes cruel

  with pain, my own

  reflection in a knife.

  The look of love gives the face beauty.

  We look at him

  as if he were a stain.

  We look at him.

  Entry in an Unknown Hand

  And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.

  By some inexplicable oversight

  nobody jeers when I walk down the street.

  I have been allowed to go on living in this room. I am not asked to explain my presence anywhere.

  What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and are any left unexecuted?

  Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking certain jobs?

  They are absolutely shameless at the bank— you'd think my name meant nothing to them. Nonchalantly they hand me the sum I've requested,

  but I know them. It's like this everywhere—

  they think they are going to surprise me: I, who do nothing but wait.

  Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up— very clever.

  They think that they can scare me.

  I am always scared.

  And how much courage it requires to get up in the morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates you!

  At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and refuse to go on, it's not done.

  I go on

  dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip,

  accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white laughter and applause,

  past a million unlighted windows, peered out at by the retired and their aged attack dogs—

  toward my place,

  the one at the end of the counter,

  the scalpel on the napkin.

  Duration

  On the sill

  the blown-out candle

  burning

  in the past.

  Frozen clouds

  passing over

  the border

  north. Listen

  to the end,

  listen with me.

  III

  No Longer or Not Yet

  From a phrase by Hermann Broch

  In the gray temples of business

  In the famine of the ant-bewitched seed

  Wolves attacking people in the half-deserted suburbs

  And kings dead with their hands crossed on their genitals a thousand years from now

  In sunlight shining on your vacant place at the table

  In the sneer and the kick in the face world without end

  In my crouched shadow loping beside me

  In the imbecilic prose of my thoughts

  In the voice of the one fingerprinted blindfolded and shot

  World of dead parents unconsciously aped without end

  In the hand above the rainbow horses of the Peche-Merle cave walls

  We interrupt this program to bring you the announcement that enemy ICBMs will begin to arrive in ten minutes

  In the strangeness which corridors and stairwells have for children

  Death of the weekday

  In their parties alone in a sip from an empty cup

  In the little grass toad beating in your palm

  The spider spinning in the dust the barren worm

  The death of tears

  In the gashed vivid colors of gas station restrooms at three in the morning

  (And we thank Thee for destroying the destroyers of the world)

  In the unaccompanied boy on the Greyhound the old woman with a balloon

  World no longer or not yet

  In the moon which goes dragging the ocean and turning its chalky steppes away

  Unsummonable world

  In the white stars in the black sky shining in the past

  The black words in the white page uttered long ago

  Death of tears

  In the storm of wordless voices the hand abruptly shocked into dictation

  (Envelop me clothe me in blackness book closed)

  In early March crocuses pushing deafly through soil

  While you quietly turn between dreams like a page

  The morning light standing in the room like someone who has returned after long absence younger

  World no longer or not yet

  IV

  Look into Its Eyes

  The leaved wind,

  the leaved wind in the mirror

  and windows, perceived by the one-week-old.

  Forever, we weren't here-

  Biography

  The light was getting bad;

  he wished the rain would stop.

  He'd try again tomorrow—

  anyway, he had to walk.

  Brain-sick. Wet pavement. Green neon.

  The light was getting awful—

  had to walk the ghost.

  He'd try again, he wished.

  He'd try again.

  The Day

  My mother picks me up at school. Strange. I leave the others playing, walk to where she's parked— and why are we driving so slowly?

  You have to turn right here, she whispers. When we get there the whole house is silent. Why's that? Does this mean I can watch The Three Stooges}

  Evidently. She's driving away now, and he's not in his basement typing: he isn't there at all, I've checked. This must be my lucky day.

  Night Writing

  The sound of someone crying in the next apartment.

  In an unfamiliar city, where I find myself once more,

  unprepared for this specific situation

  or any situation whatsoever, now—

  frozen in the chair,

  my body one big ear.

  A big ear crawling up a wall.

  In the room where I quietly rave and gesticulate— and no one must hear me!— alone until sleep:

  my life a bombed site turning green again.

  The sound of someone crying

  There

  {for Thomas Frank}

  Let it start to rain, the streets are empty now. Over the roof hear the leaves coldly conversing in whispers; a page turns in the book left open on the table. The streets are empty, now it can begin.

  Like you

  I wasn't present

  at the burial. This morning

  I have walked out for the first time and wander here among the blind flock of names standing still in the grass—

  (the one on your stone

  will remain

  listed in telephone books

  for a long time, I guess, light

  from a disappeared star …)

  —just to locate the place,

  to come closer, without knowing where you are

  or if you know I am there.

  Poem

  [for Frank Bidart}

  Per each dweller

  one grass blade, one leaf

  one apartment

  one shadow

  one rat

  By itself, d
efending a lost position,

  the poem

  writing the poet—

  Anvil of solitude

  So diminish the city's population

  by one, and go

  add your tear to the sea

  Heart that wonderfully lasted until I harned how to write what it so hnged to say

  Nothing of the kind.

  A Day Comes

  A day comes

  when it has always been winter,

  will always be winter.

  Witnesses said the crowd fled

  through the park, chased by policemen on horseback

  past the Tomb of the Unknown

  Celebrity as the guard

  was being changed,

  but they are gone.

  The witnesses are gone.

  A day comes

  when the planet stops turning.

  It is February here,

  late afternoon.

  It will always be late afternoon,

  neither dark nor light out.

  But we cannot be bothered,

  because we are asleep;

  the door is locked.

  Now and then somebody comes and knocks

  and goes away again

  back down the hall,

  back down the stairs.

  But we cannot be bothered,

  because we are asleep

  and listening,

  listening.

  Do you hear the wind?

  We have always been asleep,

  will always be asleep—

  turning over

  like pages on fire.

  Where were we?

  We were listening. No, I don't hear it either.

  The wind, the marching

  boots, the burning

  names.

  Three Discarded Fragments

  From the notebooks of Rilke

  Who can say, when I go to a window, that someone near death doesn't turn his eyes in my direction and stare and, dying, feed on me. That in this very building the forsaken face isn't lifted, that needs me now

  *

  That smile, for a long time I couldn't describe it— the velvet depression left by a jewel…

  *

  A child's soul like a leaf light still shines through

  The Street

  On it lives one bird

  who commences singing, for some reason best

  known to itself, at precisely 4 a.m.

  Each day I listen for it in the night.

  I too have a song to say alone,

  but can't begin. On it, surrounded by blocks of black warehouses,

  is located this room. I say this room, but no one knows

  how many rooms I have. So many rooms how will I light

  This isn't working out, is it

  Here's what really occurred, in my own words

  I murdered my father—and if he comes back, I'll kill him again—but first I persuaded him to abandon my mother. Now you know. It was me all along. Then I got bored, held a knife to her throat, and forced her to marry the sadist who tortured my brother for ten years.

  I feel bad about it, but what can I do.

  I mean we're talking about a genetic predisposition here.

  I am taking my medication. And things have gotten a lot better.

  And if I ever finish writing this, I'm going to tear that bird's head off and eat it.

  My Work

  The way I work is strange.

  For one thing, you would never call it work.

  Although I'm good at that.

  Work is not the term.

  It destroys me, I adore it—

  I'll look at it someday and noticing its utility still fails to surpass that of a lyre locked up in a glass case tuned an octave above human hearing,

  I'll take an ax to it.

  I'll stop speaking to it.

  I'll sit alone in some shithole and inject it until the jewels roll out of my eyes.

  I don't know what all I'll do,

  snow of

  unlit afternoon …

  mute and agreed-to descent

  Coordinates

  Waking up at an improbable hour

  in the small gray-lit Boston apartment

  where I can never bring myself

  to believe I actually live;

  going off in the winter morning to teach

  certain there's been a mistake,

  knowing as I enter the classroom

  the students will look in my face

  with unanimous amusement

  and lack of recognition,

  that before I can utter a word

  someone in a suit will appear

  and ask me to come with him.

  *

  This won't hurt at all.

  It does?

  Well we haven't been taking good care of them

  have we. Difficulty explaining to some

  the concept of financial terror—

  specifically, that if you're afraid to buy food

  if you can help it you are not going to spend

  $1,500 on a tooth;

  difficulty of explaining anything

  with your mouth clamped open.

  Under anesthesia

  I walk along a sunflower field I know of

  *

  It was still day

  when I boarded the train.

  The tunnel

  then the Charles,

  and soft blue lights of traffic in the rain.

  *

  Everyone in his right mind is asleep. A black car glides past, in its wake (the

  speed blossoming coldly

  through fingers and spine) a prolonged Coltrane scream

  and a shiver of beauty open the night

  Waiting Up

  I can remember you

  mentioning once

  how you'd wait until your mother was preoccupied

  or gone, to dress

  the doll all in white

  for its little funeral—

  how all the while it stared into your eyes

  with its cold unbeckonable eyes,

  and seemed to smile.

  Why this

  I couldn't say. And then again,

  why not? It's easy

  to remember anything.

  I'll walk now, maybe.

  The clouds' stature slumberously building

  and blooming on the horizon,

  identityless, huge

  gesticulations from the trees,

  a bird's voice

  hidden back in the leaves,

  the remote barely audible wake

  from the roar of an airliner's engines

  fill the dim morning.

  Maybe your presence

  will startle me now;

  maybe I'll rise from

  this chair.

  Maybe the room will be empty.

  The room will be empty, and you will not come.

  Guests

  Smell of winter pine trees in the air;

  around me night, the wind, Marie, the stars.

  Last night I dreamed I stood here,

  this very spot—why I've come—

  lights on in a house across the valley

  where there is no house.

  Stood here as I lay beside you

  and looked so fondly at those lights

  they might have been our home, and why not?

  Everyone you see

  lives somewhere.

  How is this done?

  Winter Entries

  Love no one, work, and don't let the pack know you're wounded.

  Stupid, disappointed strategies.

  Hazel wind of dusk, I have lived so much.

  Friendless eeriness of the new street—

  The poem does not come, but its place is kept set.

  Going North in Winter

  The sound of pines in the wind.

  And to think you're the only person on earth

  isn't hard, at the end

&
nbsp; of the long journey nowhere.

  Yet in the end I have come to

  love this room and be the one

  looking out on snowfields, blank

  scores of wire fence in the deepening

  snow, the wind through them a passage

  of remembered music, bare

  unbeckoning branches

  with never a ghost

  of a deciduous rustling,

  the stilled river

  with the sheet over its face—

  going north in winter.

  And it's all right

  to glance out the window:

  the fear will grow less

  or more intense, but

  it will always be there. Unseen

  it's a palpable force,

  isn't it. Like electricity

  which can be employed,

  as has been pointed out,

  to kill you in a chair

  or light your room.

  But I'm through with that now.

  I reach over and switch on the dark.

  It's all right to pronounce a few words

  when you're by yourself, and feel a little joy.

  The Night World &

  the Word Night

  {1993}

  Illegibility

  Hawk in golden space

  Thick-leaved, darkly

  beckoning trees

  bigger than the house

  Sunlit apparitional

  peaks of a thunderhead

  fading

  to the east

  Page

  from conception to death mask

  The stranger who approaches on the street and says, You don't remember me

  Occurrence

  I've gotten everyone who hurt me.

  In a blackout a man loads his shotgun again.

  Outside the genuine star-spangled twilight

  of North Dakota

  unfurls, twinkling and barking.

  Then he becomes a ghost.

  Big windblown rags of bitching crows

  resettle

  in the trees out back.

  Pawtucket Postcards

  Neon sign missing a letter

  Firearm with an obliterated serial number

  There's always death

  But getting there—

  you can't just say the word