Poems by Franz Wright

March 29, 2010

“Wheeling Motel” <separator></separator>The vast waters flow past its back yard.  You can purchase a six-pack in bars! Tammy Wynette’s on the marquee<separator></separator>a block down. It’s twenty-five years ago:  you went to death, I to life, and  which was luckier God only knows.<separator></separator>There’s this line in an unpublished poem of yours. The river is like that,  a blind familiar.<separator></separator>The wind will die down when I say so; the leaden and lessening light on the current.<separator></separator>Then the moon will rise like the word reconciliation,  like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.<separator></separator>— from Wheeling Motel     “Beginning Again” <separator></separator>“If I could stop talking, completely cease talking for a year, I might beg in to get well,” he muttered.  Off alone again performing brain surgery on himself in a small badly lit  room with no mirror. A room whose floor ceiling and walls  are all mirrors, what a mess  oh my God—<separator></separator>And still it stands, the question not how begin  again, but rather<separator></separator>Why?<separator></separator>So we sit there together  the mountain  and me, Li Po said, until only the mountain  remains.<separator></separator> <separator></separator> “Prescience” <separator></separator>We speak of Heaven who have not yet accomplished even this, the holiness of things  precisely as they are, and never will!<separator></separator>Before death was I saw the shining wind.  To disappear, today’s as good a time as any.  To surrender at last<separator></separator>to the vast current – And look, even now there’s still time.  Time for the glacial, cloud-paced<separator></separator>soundless music to unfold once more.  Time, inexhaustible wound, for y our unwitnessed and destitute coronation.<separator></separator>— from God's Silence