USA

SHAVING IN THE DARK

How old is the sun today

Where are the shoes of yesteryear

What an evil potato goes through
we can never know, but
I'm beginning to resemble one

Ah, a little light now

It is the hour
the moment
when it becomes possible
to distinguish a white
thread from a black,
so prayer begins

I see a shadowy reflection now our fingers touch

There's nothing like what is

fragile and momentary
as the pale yellow light along the windowsill
in winter north
of nowhere yet
if it were not for winter nothing
would get done

would finally get done

I've been all around this world

and not to die in hell
not to die in the flames of hell homeless with a cell phone please

There's nothing like today

And contributing one's atoms to the green universe
how strange is that

And some have managed to live in constant awareness
that all things, every evil thing
will be forgotten, dispensing
to mourn for every radiant thing, and so seeing
the radiance.

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 now in that graveyard, its skyline
visible not 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 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.

THE WORD "I"

Harder to breathe
near the summit, and harder

to remember
where you came from,

why you came

Winter's
harder, and harder to say
the word "I"
with a straight face,
and sleep--

who can sleep. Who has time

to prepare for the big day
when he will be required
to say goodbye to everyone, including
the aforementioned pronoun, relinquish
all earthly attachment
completely, and witness
the end of the world--

harder in other words
not to love it

not to love it so much

APRIL ORCHARD

We think if we're not conscious we exist
we won't exist, but
how can that be?
Just look at the sun.
Oh, if I could only make myself
completely unafraid--once
born, we never die--
what talks we'd have, and will. It's theorized
the universe is only one
among others, infinite
others. Though
didn't Christ tell us, In my father's house
there are many rooms. . .
And I would tell you
what it's like,
real fear. And
how there are human beings for whom the sun
is never going to shine
is never going to rise again, ever, not
really--
not the real sun.
They're not exactly waking up
in radiant awareness
and celebration of their own presence these days,
who'd get rid of themselves with no more thought
(if it were possible) than you would give to
taking off a glove.
How in deep sleep sometimes even we get well.
So you can believe me, in the far deeper
sleep (these new apple leaves, maybe) we are all going
to be perfectly all right.

FLIGHT

1.
That glass was it filled with alcohol, water, or light

At ten
I turned you into a religion

The solitary
four-foot priest of you, I kept
the little manger candle
burning, I
kept your black half-inch of
scripture
in the hiding place

Destroyer
of the world

That empty

glass


2.
In which city was it, in fourth or fifth grade, Mother
read in the newspaper you'd be appearing
and dressed me up in suit
and little tie
and took me
I wanted to run to you--who were all these people?--
I sat alone beaming
at you who could not meet my eyes, and after
you shyly approached
and shook my hand


3.
If I'm walking the streets of a city
covering every square inch of the continent
all its lights out
and empty of people,
even then
you are there

If I'm walking the streets
overwhelmed with this love for the living

I will still be a blizzard at sea

Since you left me at eight I have always been lonely

star-far from the person right next to me, but

closer to me than my bones you

you are there


4.
It's 1963 again, the old Minneapolis airport so vast
to me, and I am running
after the long flight alone I am running
running into your huge arms--
Now
I am forty-five now and I am dreaming,
dreaming--nobody
will ever believe this--I'm dreaming
we are together again we are both forty-five
and I have you all to myself this time, and we are walking
together we're walking down a glowing-blue tunnel
we're on time for our flight, I can hardly believe it
we are traveling somewhere together alone
God knows where we are going, and who cares
we're together, walking
and happily talking
and laughing, and breathing

WALKING TO 
MARTHA'S VINEYARD

And the ocean smells like lilacs in late August--how
         is that.

The light there muted (silver) as remembered light.

Do you have any children?

No, lucky for them.

Bad things happen when you get hands, dolphin.

Can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing?

There is no down or up in space or in the womb.

If they'd stabbed me to death on the day I was born, it
        would have been an act of mercy.

Like the light the last room, the windowless room at the
        end, must look out on.  Gold-tinged, blue

vapor trail breaking up now like the white line you see,
        after driving all day, when your eyes close;

vapor trail breaking up now between huge clouds resembling
        a kind of Mt. Rushmore of your parents' faces.

And these untravelled windy back roads here--cotton
        leaves blowing past me, in the long blue
        horizontal light--

if I am on an island, how is it they go on forever.

This sky like an infinite tenderness, I have caught
       glimpses of that, often, so often, and never
yet have
       I described it, I can't, somehow, I never will.

How is it that I didn't spend my whole life being
       happy, loving other human beings' faces.

And wave after wave, the ocean smells like lilacs in
       late August.

REGISTRATION OF NAMES

I see us in our late teens
beautiful and damaged
like the gene for mania, but more fun
than a topless rodeo
Ghosts

of the future, the young--
childhood plus sex
make one one
lunatic wanderer, in the midwestern autumn
solemn and Rimbaudian

Some plausibly sorrowful lie
got me into this, maybe
one will get me out

The decade began with the chaste knight,
and concluded with a visit

from General Franz P. Wright, Supreme Commander
of paranoid recluses, grayhaired
children, a weird page a day
a dark hilarity
awful to live without as love.

THE NEW CHILD

The fish applaud the ocean;

I shake hands with the sky.

And there is this tall family

of trees I will visit, the water-

colored windows

of that ancient blue house

where I might have lived.

ENTRY AND PRAYER
-- for Gail Whitney

When you get tired of reading
all the beautiful words
by lousy human beings, and come to

the end of your patience with the voluminous
indeed inexaustible
mediocrities of goodness,

what to do? I suggest--
I don't know.
Let him think.

And if there are no words

to this place give him back
the illiterate sleep: no need
the haldol needle night-night;

let him go quietly, not
in horror,
not in glory.

FROM A
DISCARDED IMAGE

The world's wordless beauty's
intact and can never be other than
intact no matter what
harm we perpetually do
and have done
and will I can I assure you everyone
do,
forever,
as they say

World's wordless beauty, and the word's
worldless liberty

The champagne shopping binge
is over
The check is about to arrive
and nobody knows how much it will be
I know I don't give a shit not now

The world's
wordless
beauty intact, indeed

it can never be other
than

radiantly intact
like the stars, like the stars

when the stars have no names once again.

© All Copyright, Franz Wright.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.