Earlier Poems

by Franz Wright

  Under a glass sky each one has its own star all the sun it requires for the time being

  *

  Apparitional

  once you appeared

  in the Pacific northwest

  No one was scared

  the fools

  An exotic curiosity perhaps

  you had found a place that felt a little like your own and were promptly placed under a jar or glass house

  At that time people sometimes just moved on the glass house fell into decay

  Lightning maybe or slow-motion shattering silent over time And to no one's surprise

  no one being there at the moment

  the resurrection of your white face rose

  there in the frost

  in your reversed

  mirror world like Persephone's

  darker twin sister

  who dies of spring

  Your newly awakened

  groped toward the cliffs

  salt crystallizing like honey the petal-tongues

  tasting the familiar

  wind tasting their exile

  blindly gazing toward Japan

  *

  Camellia scent

  too subtle for the mind (perhaps

  someday when the mind is human)

  we've been given your visible presence

  nobody knows why We don't even know why we were given our own

  But who would choose smell over vision As post- or prehumans we are accustomed to disagreeing over everything it seems to be our job there's nothing we do better

  and any fool can do it It's like breathing no doubt we would perish if it were to cease for five minutes

  But in your presence could anyone ever

  deny would anyone dare deny

  it's a good thing you are here

  Camellia visible as wind moving the leaves

  moving our hearts

  Camellia of the one-starred sea at dawn.

  The Blizzard

  You sit in the unlit room watching

  a storm as it slowly erases the street

  and the neighbors: on one side

  the mother of four

  armed and dangerous grade-school-aged children,

  and on the other those night owls, proprietors

  of an open-all-night drive-by crack store.

  You sit in the darkening room

  gazing at the vanishing skyline

  in the distance. How long has it been?

  The room completely soundless.

  Night wind around the house, the ticking

  snow against the windows—

  for some time you've ceased to hear them

  or anything else, only the silence

  such constant nearby noises

  finally come to. The same

  way the music has passed into silence

  even as you listened, yet remains

  filling the air, your very presence

  flickering in a last

  awareness of itself.

  You are wide awake, your eyes are even open;

  yet you only notice this music

  which you carefully chose for yourself

  long after it's ceased. And you wonder

  where you might have gone

  during this absence: it seems

  to be night here. Yes,

  it is night in the room.

  But here, too, is a lamp within reach

  on a small familiar stool-like table

  beside you, beside the large chair

  which so closely resembles the one

  in which you are sitting. You reach across

  to switch on this lamp and are shocked

  by the telephone. You sit back and inhale

  the black air deep into your lungs,

  and listen to it ringing.

  Then, for a while, to it not ringing.

  Mental Illness

  A metaphor

  one in which

  the body stands

  for the soul

  who's busy

  elsewhere

  no doubt floating

  facedown

  down

  a black reverie

  Poem in Three Parts

  i. The Gratitude

  By no longer being

  here,

  you've made it easier for me to leave the world.

  2. The Wound

  The wound that never healed but learned to sing.

  3. Version of a Song of the Ituri Rain Forest Pygmies

  The darkness—where is it?

  Surrounding us

  all.

  If darkness is, darkness is good.

  The Face

  Is there a single thing in nature

  that can approach in mystery

  the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then

  its transformation between childhood and old age—

  We are surrounded at every instant by sights that ought to strike the sane unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute with gratitude and awe. However,

  there may be three sane people on earth

  at any given time: and if

  you got the chance to ask them how they do it,

  either they would not understand, or

  I think they might just stare at you

  with the embarrassment of pity. Maybe smile

  the way you do when children suddenly reveal a secret

  preoccupation with their origin, careful not to cause them shame,

  on the contrary, to evince the great congratulating pleasure

  one feels in the presence of a superior talent and intelligence;

  or simply as one smiles to greet a friend who's waking up,

  to prove no harm awaits him, you've dealt with and banished all harm.

  Depiction of a Dream (I)

  I think I have murdered a child.

  It happened earlier today

  while I was taking my nap.

  I have to take these naps,

  you see, because I never sleep.

  And they usually serve well enough

  as a means of reminding me

  and sometimes revealing

  facets, heretofore hidden,

  of my terrible character. And yet

  such numbing and saddening and

  unimpeachable representations of it

  are rarely required; the routine betrayal

  of somebody who cares about me, the opportunity

  to be betrayed and voluptuously wallow

  in that, the conviction I'm being pursued

  by unknown individuals who wish me harm

  or death do the job for the most part. This time

  I have murdered a child, I think

  he was quite a small child, one of those

  who can walk—sort of—and say a few words;

  who still emit the faint light

  which exists nowhere else, is a bit like

  the radiance certain dim stars shed

  only when your eyes are turned away

  and perceive it peripherally, yet remains,

  clever similes notwithstanding,

  wholly beyond the power to describe.

  It seems to me I'd been entrusted with him,

  a little boy belonging

  to neighbors I don't know,

  and we found ourselves holding hands, walking

  along the precarious margin

  of some deafeningly traveled freeway;

  then for some reason his tiny hand

  (you know, one you might crush like an egg

  merely by clenching your own slightly) slipped

  through my hand and he suddenly

  turned left

  and stepped into traffic. Immediately

  he was grazed by a car moving past

  at too great a speed for the driver

  even to notice, was spun to the ground

  where I rushed to his side with a heart attack

  managing to help him to his feet,


  the left shoulder shattered, eyes conscious

  but blank. We were able to enter unseen

  the woods to the right, where I half ran,

  gripping far too tightly his right hand, slashed

  blind by low branches.

  Abruptly, we came to

  a lake shining brilliantly

  just past a stand of pines.

  I don't understand what happens next. Yet

  what was I supposed to do? How could I

  take him home in this condition?

  I grabbed him by the ankles

  and with one swing smashed his head

  against a big stone. Now

  he had no head and I had this small, almost

  weightless object to dispose of. I put him

  in the water and he vanished. I returned

  to the house of his parents, and found them there

  preoccupied with many other children,

  hoping insanely no one would notice

  the absence of mine and rehearsing,

  the same way I have all my life,

  a plausibly sorrowful lie

  about the child that I had lost.

  Trying to find my way out of the darkening

  forest, the incomprehensible task

  accomplished, leaving just one more, one

  equally loathsome: surviving,

  denying everything, trying

  to go on without being killed

  again.

  Depiction of a Dream (II)

  So far I have eluded them.

  I don't have the faintest idea what I've done.

  I do know it must have been terrible:

  at this point every other person on the street

  looks as if he could be a plainclothesman;

  and whatever they did with the half of the town

  they replaced, they were splendidly trained

  in mimicking those former citizens' sullen

  opinion of my presence,

  their indifference to my comings and goings,

  to the fact that I exist at all. I'm trying to get home.

  A group of men approaches as I cross the park.

  One of them is a good friend I remember from school,

  one I lost contact with years ago. How wonderful!

  I feel happy and safe for the first time

  in so many months. We grin and embrace.

  He asks about my life. I tell him

  I will be teaching again very soon.

  I'm afraid it won't be soon, he remarks,

  with a sinister failure to alter the warmth in his voice

  or the broad smile.

  All at once the cuffs are on—

  someone's soundlessly come from behind—

  freezing through to the bones

  of my wrist, like they do,

  although he hasn't moved or ceased to gaze into my eyes

  with the same protective look of sadness and delight

  you develop at encountering some beloved person

  long considered dead, or forever lost to you.

  There are, incidentally, a couple of gun barrels

  touching my head, coldly branding

  their zeros in my temples.

  The others all stand in a ring

  surrounding me.

  I start to cry.

  I have to feed my cat first!

  I have to feed my cat.

  What's going to happen to my cat.

  I think you had to be there.

  New Leaves Bursting into Green Flames

  This is why somebody loves

  the poem, or attempts to

  make up his own verses, in other words

  devote his life to something

  that's generally held to be

  an occupation solely of the dead,

  and so impossible. (In terms of livelihood

  this is, in fact, correct.)

  Those who inhabit the rest of this block,

  the greater part of the city, the planet, to them

  it is impossible, irrelevant, and again

  on account of its clearly nonlucrative

  nature, contemptible: but I will tell you

  why one sits writing his poem, which is nothing

  in the end but the longing to locate

  the door to his own happy world

  forever locked in his face otherwise;

  to therefore see the world in terms of words, and pay

  the price for this, in a strange

  key. There is no point to it, one passing through this

  fire, yet involved's an indomitable thirst

  to attempt, without knowing how,

  knowing only you're going to fail,

  saying back to the earth

  a few words which equal

  or even rival its beauty,

  its loneliness,

  its disappointment and wrath.

  And for what? My landlord never heard of me

  and expects his rent just the same

  as he expects it from the junkies,

  giggling sophomores and cowering eccentrics

  with whom I share this building.

  I have gone on with it. I don't know why

  except that I've never loved anything else,

  its possibility anyway;

  and it is the only thing that has never

  permanently turned its back on me. And so

  I've gone on, in this absurdly ugly place—

  I have yet to hear a single note

  of that famous still sad music.

  I've done it for the sake

  of maybe 10 minutes when I was fifteen:

  when I—when it suddenly—but why describe it?

  No one will understand, no one will care

  that today, while waiting for the bus

  I looked up from the tedium

  of untreatable things

  and found them again,

  here. The few newborn

  leaves more light

  than leaf on a branch.

  They were back—or I was.

  For an instant no time had elapsed:

  these leaves were not new,

  they were the same ones, and I was not old.

  Nothing had changed, they were the same

  leaves that blazed before

  my eyes all those years ago, mind blazing.

  That moment so long ago,

  I did not have to say, was this moment.

  How could I go to the hospital

  for my appointment now,

  when I had gotten well?

  So I just turned and walked

  home. (I call it home.)

  Having nowhere else to turn

  this is where I generally go.

  What difference does it make anymore?

  And it was fine. I had not lived

  my whole life in vain—

  nothing had damaged that instant

  those minutes I had lived

  for all my life.

  And anyone, in the words

  of Andre Breton, who smirks at this

  is a pig.

  The Lord's Prayer

  I have been attempting to pray

  the Lord's Prayer for the first time

  since I was a child. Only now

  the problem is not one

  of mystified indifference, on

  the contrary. Now

  my concentration is eclipsed

  by many distractions, though I'm trying to mean it.

  One question now is the existence

  of the mad. One of the most bothersome

  things about the mad:

  they are so often right.

  Look at Christ. And yet

  as they are, after all, insane

  most don't possess the social graces,

  the finances or tact

  that would be required, so

  there is virtually no question

  of their influencing or getting any
where near

  the circles where the true and the delusional are

  legislated.

  I think of Pilate, eyebrows slightly raised in weary but astonished sarcasm, responding to the assertion, “I come to bear witness to the truth.” It's horrifying but I can never read this, that is PP's reply, “What is truth?”

  without having to suppress a strong impulse to agree. This is the abomination of the secret

  envy the sane feel for the mad with their constantly

  menaced yet suicidal willingness to say what's true with a clear conscience; envy of the torturer

  who will be going home soon, disgusted and tired from his day's legal work to supper and family.

  We've grown a good deal more cunning— compassionate, we call it. Still, we don't take any chances. We keep them under control—just think, when we could so easily kill them just like in the old days of family and morality. But it's an easy task, since they are incapable of taking any action whatsoever save that of occasionally perceiving reality. The real one.

  We do this for their own good, of course; they might hurt themselves, you see, especially

  us. And we have any number of methods which involve both their concrete surroundings and the medicinal alteration of their capacity to think. I mean, look where it got them. For no one, absolutely no one harbors the slightest desire to be reminded of reality. Things are bad enough as it is. I myself have served with a believer's heart on both sides, and I must say I greatly prefer the company of the nuts, though I will side with the sane any day.

  I will freely admit to being a little confused

  by this. It's not so much a matter

  of Lowell's off-the-cuff remark, “I am inclined to

  believe that it is better to be happy and good than to be a poet.” It isn't that simple. In fact, it is excruciatingly mysterious. But perhaps the human race is not all dressed up in mystery at all, but in reality is the Void

  in pathetically transparent drag, “or something.” “So to speak.”

  Where You Are

  Dawn finds you leafing through old address books.

  You thought you had written to everyone.

  Yes, you have. To everyone—some of them

  also wrote to you. They wrote back to you. Years ago, now. You aren't there anymore.

  Then what do you want them to say. Nothing has changed, nothing has happened

  to them—the ones who lived, the ones still at the same address. How would you ever describe it. And why.

  And what could they say. They are safe.

  They have a life, why would they want to write.

  Untitled

  I like to see the individual verses

  spread on the otherwise blank sheet of paper