The Beforelife
Page 1
ALSO BY FRANZ WRIGHT
Poetry
Tapping the White Cane of Solitude (1976)
The Earth Without You (1980)
8 Poems (1981)
The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes (1982)
Going North in Winter (1986)
Entry in an Unknown Hand (1989)
And Still the Hand Will Sleep in Its Glass Ship (1991)
Midnight Postscript (1992)
The Night World & the Word Night (1993)
Rorschach Test (1995)
Ill Lit: Selected & New Poems (1998)
Knell (1999)
God While Creating the Birds Sees Adam in His Thoughts (2001)
Hell & Other Poems (2001)
The Beforelife (2001)
Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (2003)
Translations
Jarmila. Flies: Ten Prose Poems by Erica Pedretti (1976)
The Life of Mary (poems by Rainer Maria Rilke) (1981)
The Unknown Rilke (1983)
No Siege Is Absolute (poems by René Char) (1984)
The Unknown Rilke: Expanded Edition (1991)
I wrote these poems
between December of 1998
and December of 1999
for my wife Elizabeth.
F. W.
CONTENTS
Empty Cathedral
Prescription
Translation
November 14
Memoir
Written with a Baseball Bat-Sized Pencil
Not Now
The Dead Dads
The Midnight Snack
I’m Sorry
The Ascent of Midnight
Body Bag
The Beforelife
Thanks Prayer at the Cove
Accepting an Award
Address Search
Based on a Prayer of Rabi’a al-Adawiyya
First Encounter/The City
The Neighbor
The Wedding
Entry & Prayer
The Poem Said
New Page
Doing a Line of Olga Broumas
Communion
After Apollinaire
I for One
Description of Her Eyes
Tibetans Raped by Chinese Robots
From a Discarded Image
Self-Portrait at 40
Scrolling Marquee
Bathtub Improv
Resurrection: Elegy
Simultaneous Sentences
Goodbye
Slander
Aesthetic
When You See Fame Coming Run
The Speaker
Church
Commercial for Absence
Thinking of France
The Way We Look to Them
The Miracle
Request
Homage
To a Blossoming Nut Case
Learning a Language
Fine Print
Primogeniture
Moving
Planting
PC Lullaby
Dying Thought Near the Summit
Empty Stage
Clarification
Nothingsville, MN
Thus in the pursuit of consciousness it must be understood, first, that man must do everything by himself—that is, he must penetrate to another level solely by his own efforts; and second, he can do nothing by himself—that is, his whole endeavor must be to contact higher sources and levels of energy. For unless he succeeds in so doing, he will get nothing and can get nothing.
Rodney Collin
EMPTY CATHEDRAL
There’s this pew
at the back
that’s been
waiting
for you
all your life, like your death bed.
Christ Criminal
hanging
above, eyes and mouth
closed suggesting
before you too enter
the third person, light
one candle
for the here,
will you.
PRESCRIPTION
While you lie in bed
watching the movie
of every last terrible
thing you have done, you
consider with high admiration
and envy the one
of unscared face
and conscience come
with his own slip of paper
proclaiming
bearer’s incontrovertible
privilege to sleep,
to ask
and receive it
right now
by sidereal name.
TRANSLATION
Death is nature’s way
of telling you to be quiet.
Of saying it’s time
to be weaned, your conflagration starved
to diamond.
I’ll give you something to cry about.
And what those treetops swaying
dimly in the wind spelled.
NOVEMBER 14
After church we had breakfast at a diner nearby, and when we got home provided a poor squirrel in our street with a burial: cardboard box, plastic bag, garbage can at the curb. He was perfect,
a large, unmolested and sleeping-appearing squirrel with a little brilliant dark blood at its nostrils and the wind slightly lifting the gray and black hair on its tail and inside its small ear to make me cry.
MEMOIR
Just hope he forgot the address
and don’t answer the phone
for a week:
put out all the lights
in the house—
behave like you aren’t there
if some night when
it’s blizzarding, you see
Franz Wright arrive
on your street with his suitcase
of codeine pills,
lugging that heavy
black manuscript
of blank texts.
WRITTEN WITH A BASEBALL BAT-SIZED PENCIL
You can meet them all
here, these are the people
who aren’t coming back:
the young woman who lives in the room
across the hall, the pretty blonde
who enters in a speechless rage
to leaf through your suitcase
while you’re lying in bed and deny it
when asked why, deny
that she is there at all (“—don’t go telling tales on me”).
The teenage stroke victim
who keeps stuffing his clothes
in his mother’s hamper
at home, the black plastic
refuse container
in the bright sterilized
kitchen we’re barred from when hungry
between feedings, coming back
to do it again
each time they’re returned to him. Then
there’s the seventy-year-old manic virgin
who is having a hard time taking her eyes off
your ass, mooning after you, floating
downhall
behind you wherever you turn—
you can laugh
until your heart stops, nothing’s
capable of persuading her
you aren’t the answer to her prayers;
who secretly opens your door
a crack in the blackness, she stays up all night
gazing cadaverously down
or she would
if it weren’t for the guy in white come
on the half hour shining
his flashlight in your open eyes to see
if you’ve killed yourself yet. And who knows,
you might be one of them
yourself
by now, stranger
NOT NOW
for Dzvinia Orlowsky
Where is
the man of heaven
in me—
my body’s
filthy
face and hands
completely filthy
with
the man of dust
This mask
this glove
of human flesh
is all I have
and that’s not bad
and that’s not good
not good enough
not now
THE DEAD DADS
It’s easier to get a rope
through the eye of a needle than
the drunk son of a drunk
into stopping
into waking—oh no, not
this guy he’s intent on
finding out and finding out
exactly
what the poor old fucker felt like
and hell,
all he has asked
is one good cold responsible
look at the corpse
when it meets him, living,
at the door— …
THE MIDNIGHT SNACK
It was night, I was
having a fairly nice time
for a cockroach
in a psychiatrist’s kitchen—
chewing in the blackness,
a terrified but unmolested listening.
A bargain,
I remember thinking,
at twice the price I paid;
perhaps I shall injure myself
and require an injection for pain.
A hungry ghost at any age.
But it was night, and it would be
for the time being,
I was doing all right.
I’M SORRY
Child I helped
to do away with
you would be
almost an adult now
I hope my friend
Like me you never got to have your childhood
You never even got to exist
yet
you still bear the name
I gave you
again for my benefit
mindlessly
after your death
your cheap and meaningless
banishment
forgive me
THE ASCENT OF MIDNIGHT
Sometimes I’d like to give up—
I want to blindfold this head
put a gun to it, and say
shitface
this is the way
you caused me to feel
nearly all the time.
But what is the use of that type
of behavior. I’m getting so tired, and I’m nowhere
nowhere near
my illustrious friends (yet
I’m still fairly high
in the mountains
beneath the sea …)
BODY BAG
Like the condom in a pinch one size fits all.
THE BEFORELIFE
for Thomas Lux
Meanwhile,
I visit the word world.
In between feeding my friends,
the alert preternaturally unafraid
birds
of Purgatory Cove.
THANKS PRAYER AT THE COVE
A year ago today
I was unable to speak
one syntactically coherent
thought let alone write it down: today
in this dear and absurdly allegorical place
by your grace
I am here
and not in that graveyard, its skyline
visible now from the November leaflessness
and I am here to say
it’s 5 o’clock, too late to write more
(especially for the one whose eyes
are starting to get dark), the single
dispirited swan out on the windless brown
transparent floor floating
gradually backward
blackward
no this is what I still
can see, white
as a joint in a box of little cigars—
and where is the mate
Lord, it is almost winter in the year
2000 and now I look up to find five
practically unseeable mallards at my feet
they have crossed
nearly standing on earth they’re so close
looking up to me
for bread—
that’s what my eyes of flesh see (barely)
but what I wished to say
is this, listen:
a year ago today
I found myself riding the subway psychotic
(I wasn’t depressed, I wanted to rip my face off)
unable to write what I thought, which was nothing
though I tried though I finally stopped trying and
looked up
at the face of the man
directly across from me, and it began
to melt before my eyes
and in an instant it was young again
the face he must have had
once when he was five
and in an instant it happened again only this
time
it changed to the face of his elderly
corpse and back in time
it changed
to his face at our present
moment of time’s flowing and then
as if transparently
superimposed I saw them all at once
OK I was insane but how insane
can someone be I thought, I did not
know you then
I didn’t know you were there God
(that’s what we call you, grunt grunt)
as you are at every moment
everywhere of what we call
the future and the past
And then I tried once more
experimentally
I focused
on another’s face, no need to describe it
there is only one
underneath
these scary and extremely
realistic rubber masks
and there is as I also know now
by your grace one
and only one person on earth
beneath a certain depth
the terror and the love
are one, like hunger, same
in everyone
and it happened again, das Unglück geschah
you might say nur mir allein it happened
no matter who I looked at
for maybe five minutes long enough
long enough
this hidden trinity
I saw, the others
will say I am making it up
as if that mattered
Lord,
I make up nothing
not one word.
ACCEPTING AN AWARD
A voice
neither cruel nor benevolent
said—this
was spring
in 1996—
look at him:
he can’t live and pretends
he is going to die …
One eye in tears and one that’s never going to cry.
And who could have foreseen I’d outevil them all,
all my old evil friends
put together?
You,
that’s who.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid
and her boyfriend Why
why, why.
So welcome back.
How have you been.
And for this immense pleasure and honor
what will I owe this time—?
ADDRESS SEARCH
And you will find me
any night
now, try
at the motherless sky.
com
How dare you
interrupt
me.com
I’
m sorry
I was ever born.com
No doubt
you can always find
me any
time, any
where
in the damned world
BASED ON A PRAYER OF RABI’A AL-ADAWIYYA