by Franz Wright
Rhode Island Artificial Limb Co.
Lights of the abandoned
households reflected
in the little river through the leaves
The posthistoric clouds
Provincetown Postcards
Wolf stars
Owl's head moth
Icon-yellow twilight
Sound of leaves & sea the silent sun
Will all have had ample experience when the last loneliness comes
Harbor bells in the blizzard
Loneliness
Say you wake
in the night
abruptly alone
in the midst of addressing
vast stadiums …
Or at an intersection windows shattered your forehead leaning on the horn a crowd materializing a light snow beginning
Like the taste of alcohol to children
No
That with which there is nothing to compare
Say you have no friends, or say you have to go to sleep
To see your friends
There
It's not so bad the stitches itch where they removed your rage is all
Where they removed those thoughts
And no one misses them
After several weeks
everyone learns
how to tie his own shoe
You get a little doll that looks like you
Words
I don't know where they come from.
I can summon them
(sometimes I can)
into my mind,
into my fingers,
I don't know why. Or I'll suddenly hear them
walking, sometimes
waking—
they don't often come when I need them.
When I need them most terribly,
never.
Forgotten in an Old Notebook
Outside the leaves are quiet
as their shade. Hidden
inside them a bird is waiting
for it to get dark
to try its goodnight voice.
I have just looked in the mirror,
and come and sat down at the table.
What happens to our faces?
Gone
I dreamed you came and sat beside me on the bed
It was something that you had to tell me
I dreamed you came and sat beside me
Like a drowning at a baptism
Like an embittered shopper returning
The sad misspelled obscenities on men's room walls
Snow on dark water … Something
After Rimbaud
While the child's forehead, eaten with red torments, Appeals to the white swarm of indistinct hallucinations, Appear at his bedside two big charming sisters With slender fingers and silver nails.
They seat the boy beside a wide-open Window, where tangled flowers float in the blue air; Where their long and terrible fingers can walk Seductively through his heavy damp hair.
He hears their timid breathing's chant, the viscid Fragrance of the honey of vegetables and roses, Now and then interrupted by a startled hiss: saliva Or the desire for kisses sucked back from the lips.
He hears their black eyelashes flicker in the perfumed Silences; within his drunken sleepiness The stained nails of their sweet, electrified fingers Crackle with the deaths of tiny lice.
Now the wine of laziness rises inside him: A sigh into a harmonica, delirium. He feels a longing to weep which rises and fades Again and again to the rhythm of their caresses.
Certain Tall Buildings
I know a little
about it: I know
if you contemplate suicide
long enough, it
begins to contemplate you—
oh, it has plans for you.
It calls to your attention
the windows of certain tall
buildings, wooded snowfields
in your memory where you might cunningly vanish
to remotely, undiscoverably
sleep. Remember your mother
hanging the cat
in front of you when you were four?
Why not that? That
should fix her. Or deep drugs
glibly prescribed by psychiatrists weary
as you of your failure to change
into someone else—
you'll show them
change.
These thoughts, occurring once too often,
are no longer your own. No,
they think you.
The thing is not to entertain them
in the first place, dear
life, friend.
Don't leave me here without you.
August Insomnia
He slowly replaced the receiver like somebody who had just used it.
He slowly replaced the receiver
like somebody who had just used it
to strike himself
hard,
several times,
on the skull.
Midnight, blue leaves swarming against the glass.
The pregnant child alone on her front doorstep,
the starving moon.
He slowly replaced the receiver.
Jamais Vu
Whether I grow old, betray my dreams, become a ghost
or die in flames
like Gram,
like Frank,
like Thomas James—
I think for a while I'll come back as a guest to a childhood room where the sun is the sun once again and the wind in the trees is the wind in the trees, and the summer afternoon the endless summer afternoon of books, that only happiness.
I won't have written this.
Smell of leaves before rain, green
light that shines not on, but from the earth—
for me, too,
a hunger darkened the world, and a fierce joy made it blaze into unrecognizable beauty.
Night Said
I lay on my back in the yard, my face among the stars. Night said, Don't go inside. There's murder in the house, but that is far away; don't answer when they call.
They used to call and call,
but it was so dark in the yard.
And I had gone so far away—
guided by the stars
I could set out from the burning house
and watch them sink inside.
I tried to stay inside,
thinking perhaps you would call,
cause silence in the shrieking house:
if I were in the yard
the voice behind the stars
might never find the way;
plus you can't be out there always. You are compelled to come inside at some point, leave the stars abruptly when the strange man calls your name into the long black yard, obey the catastrophic house.
I knew I had a real house, with a real father, a ways—
some states—beyond that yard. I was a happy child, inside. Until my name was called I lay on my back filling with stars,
I raised my hand amid the stars.
Tumultuous leaves hid the bright nightmare house.
Happy and evil for a moment, I called
drop H-bomb here—a little ways
from me, a bird spoke once. Inside
someone flung open the door to my yard,
but called my name into an empty yard. By now the house was only one more star— unwithstandable inside, but just a jewel-light far away.
The World
Mood-altering cloud of late autumn
Gray deserted street
Place settings for one—dear visible things …
The insane are right, but they're still the insane.
While there is time let me a little belong.
The Forties
And in the desert cold men invented the star
Untitled
I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn't p
revent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren't dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)
The Lovers
Who knows but before their closed eyes both faces change in slow reverse
recapitulation
of the faces
each has never seen again:
fetally then
full-blown, in a moment
taking on the different
features of their secret
genealogies
of lovers,
until each has the face
that first troubled the other's
and both sleep with a stranger in their arms.
Untitled
This was the first time I knelt
and with my lips, frightened, kissed
the lit inwardly pink petaled lips.
It was like touching a bird's exposed heart with your tongue.
Summer dawn flowing into the room parting the curtains—the lamp dimming—breeze
rendered visible. Lightning,
and then soft applause from the leaves …
Almost children, we lay asleep in love listening to the rain.
We didn't ask to be born.
Say My Name
I'd be entombed
inside a period
in the closed book
in the huge dark
of St. Paul's
where we used to meet,
wafted
downaisle toward
banked sunlight-colored candles.
I'd be in your mouth,
in that huger dark:
body that stands for the soul.
Word that means you are loved.
For Martha
You are the bright yellow spider who hides in the apricot leaves, watching me work.
You are the redwood shade pouring down around me in blond columns, and you are the air
coolly and goldenly scented
as the certainty of sleep when I lie down weary
and at peace, and as the certainty that I will rise again
sane and refreshed— …
And my bright yellow spider hiding in the apricot leaves.
For a Friend Who Disappeared
Just one more time. Only one—
the small rose of blood blooming in the syringe—
one to compel haunted speech to the lips,
sure. Some immense seconds pass. Dusk's
prow slowly glides right up Avenue B;
the young Schumann's two personalities
continue discussing each other
in the diary. Your eyes
move to the warning
on a pack of cigarettes—
good thing you're not pregnant!
Still no speech, but no pain either:
no New York,
nothing,
sweet.
You happen to know that you're home.
And how simple it was, and how smart
to come back: in the moon
on its oak branch
the owl slowly opens
its eyes like a just-severed head
that hears its name called out,
and spreads its wings
and disappears;
and the moth leaves the print of its lips on the glass, lights on the lamp's still-warm bulb, the napper's forehead, his hand, where it rests down the chair arm, fingers slowly opening.
Untitled
Sicklemoon between thunderheads in the blue of four in the afternoon
And when the first star occurred to the sky— …
Why did one write
such things? Not
to describe them—
they don't need us to describe them.
But to utter them
into existence,
just as they hokedat us into existence …
To give back to them
the existence perceiving them
bestows on us—
just to say them:
to say and feel said,
feel somehow at home here.
Time to Stop Keeping a Dream Journal
This time I dreamed I was writing a dream down
And later on that gray April morning—an out-of-the-house experience!—
the cemetery blanketed with robins
I held my shadow's hand (he leadeth me)
Hour when each human reports to the mirror
Leafprints in the sidewalk
unidentified flowering
lavender shrubs
in an otherwise black-and-white
landscape, I pass
through an evil rainbow
A pair of glasses found in a pile of dead leaves: one of the stations of my day
(Orders, orders, orders: yes, Your Absence—no, Your Nonexistence …)
And inevitable night again i a.m. leaves' sounds the empty moth still clinging to the screen
Shape of leaf mouth eye—the spider in the iris—
And the great trees rustle the moon staring into the sockets in the grass
And 2 o'clock streets filled with teenagers in fascist drag
And in five years you see them collecting at bus stops like dust
And still the hand will sleep in its glass ship— …
Lament
I took a long walk
that night in the rain.
It was fine.
Bareheaded, shirt open: in love
nobody gives a shit about the rain.
I suddenly realized that I would hitchhike
the Go or so miles into Kent—
it was so late
I could make it by dawn,
and see the leaf-light in late April
called your eyes. The evil
we would do
had not yet come. No one but me
knows what you were at that time, with
a loveliness to make men cry
out, haunting beyond beauty.
We had what everyone is dying
for lack of, and let it
finally just slip away.
I will never understand this.
I was at the time a relatively intelligent
person. Only
terrorstricken already
at what my life would be—that what I longed for most
would be exactly what I'd get
at the price, sooner or later, little by little,
of everything else,
every last fucking thing.
Yet that morning exists, it must,
it happened. And the years we had—
those almost endless summer afternoons and nights,
a solitary hawk sleeping on the wind, your
incandescent whiteness emerging from the water
in the moon, or snow
beginning, horizontally, to fall as you fall
asleep with your head on my shoulder while I drive …
where are they? They exist, the way the world will
when I'm dead. I won't be there
but another nineteen-year-old idiot will be
and to him I say: Don't do it!
But he will—blinded, spellbound, destroyed
by the search for something
he can never see or touch,
when all the while he holds it in his arms.
Midnight Postscript
{for my friend Joseph Kahn: born ipso, drowned 1982}
Walking the floor after midnight I leaf through your pharmacopoeia or a book on stars.
How I love the night.
It should always be
night, and the living with their TVs, vacuum cleaners
and giggling inanities
silenced.
With here and there a window lit a low golden mysterious light.
I love the night world,
the word night. Book & door. Joseph. Death's haves— …
I'm never going to get this right.
And I ca
n't go on forming
and tasting your name
or biting down in blinding pain forever—no,
from now on I have entered
and live in our unspoken words.
And the space I took up in the world scarlessly closes like water.
The Winter Skyline Late
I walk, neverendingly walk
hating the sleet
the odd million gray disgraced looks you will meet on the subways
the streets everything that will hurt you today …
As I have walked these after-midnight
streets so many
years, unwelcome and alone
stopping a minute at some frozen pay phone
gagged on my pride
and moved on
Moonset, dawn:
Konocti
Venus-lit greenish horizon
apples
shadow-dappled in the early wind…
It might have been, somehow
Not now
Eating fear, shitting fear, convulsed with tedium and horror every time I went
to touch a pen to paper
Crying
in a downtown porno theater
But in our own eyes we are never lost
Looking at the skyline, late
some see the site of triumphant
far-off celebrations
to which they weren't invited
some see a little light
left on for them
and some
the final abrupt unendurable radiance blooming
Local bar of deceased revelers
Special subway station for distinguished lunatics
Cold stars beyond the Charles,
ward of bandaged eyes that turn and stare in my direction as I pass
Bhck wind and distant lights
I prayed
that I might disappear
Unfather, unsay me I asked irreparably here
But why are we drawn walking at ni to certain unfamiliar solitary places
Why this interest in a stranger's lights Whose ghosts are we
What happened to our faces
The wind moves shwly, fingers
read my forehead
eyelids
lips
The constant sight
