Franz Wright

You are riding the bus again burrowing into the blackness of Interstate 80, the sole passenger with an overhead light on. And I am with you. I’m the interminable fields you can’t see, the little lights off in the distance (in one of those rooms we are living) and I am the rain and the others all around you, and the loneliness you love, and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe, and the catastrophic dawn, the nicotine crawling on your skin— and when you begin to cough I won’t cover my face, and if you vomit this time I will hold you: everything’s going to be fine I will whisper. It won’t always be like this. I am going to buy you a sandwich.

Before you were I loved you and when you were born and when you took your first step Although I did not know good luck I want to say lone penguin keep sturdily waddling in the direction of those frozen mountains sister of desolate sanctity I want to scream Although I did not know you I loved you later on as just a weedy thing a little skeleton I loved Both long pre-you a child myself and as a man in retrospect I loved and I was there while they were raping you I loved although like God

And not to feel bad about dying. Not to take it so personally— it is only the force we exert all our lives to exclude death from our thoughts that confronts us, when it does arrive, as the horror of being excluded— . . . something like that, the Canadian wind coming in off Lake Erie rattling the windows, horizontal snow appearing out of nowhere across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees.

Some fish for words from shore while others, lacking in such contemplative tact, like to go wading in up to their chins through a torrent of bone-freezing diamond, knife raised, to freeze-frame incarnadine and then bid it as with hermetic wand flow on again, ferociously, transparently, name writ in river.

1 Father trellis of my voice (or noose) abruptly vanished — 2 I wear this razory fishhook of crucifix. Look. How it helps me keep my head down, down with shame, the glory and shame see this frail weightless chain: there is another like it. Sometimes my neck feels like it’s breaking — It hangs right here near the heart’s hidden room where a table is set for me not a dark bar. No more that pointless horror. Weightless frail chain massive iron seaweed and barnacle-bearded anchor — You may peek from your door toward dawn and see me attempting to make it to the end of the hallway to the restroom bent double, gasping for air in small sips but I will be there, table set for three, the unseen host, then me there to meet my own glorified body who does resemble me in a vague way, but is not particularly radiant or splendid: he is ugly, as though he had been crying all his life that can’t be my soul people scream when they first see it

To tell you the truth I’d have thought it had gone out of use long ago; there is something so 19th-century about it, with its absurd reverse Puritanism. Can withdrawal from reality or interpersonal commitment be gauged by uneasiness at being summoned to a small closed room to discuss ambiguously sexual material with a total stranger? Alone in the presence of the grave examiner, it soon becomes clear that, short of strangling yourself, you are going to have to find a way of suppressing the snickers of an eight-year-old sex fiend, and feign cu- riosity about the process to mask your indignation at being placed in this situation. Sure, you see lots of pretty butterflies with the faces of ancient Egypt- ian queens, and so forth—you see other things, too. Flying stingray vaginas all over the place, along with a few of their male counterparts transparently camouflaged as who knows what pil- lars and swords out of the old brain’s unconscious. You keep finding yourself thinking, “God damn it, don’t tell me that isn’t a pussy!” But after long silence come out with, “Oh, this must be Christ trying to prevent a large crowd from stoning a woman to death.” The thing to do is keep a straight face, which is hard. After all, you’re supposed to be crazy (and are probably proving it). Maybe a nudge and a chuckle or two wouldn’t hurt your case. Yes, it’s some little card game you’ve gotten yourself into this time, when your only chance is to lose. Fold, and they have got you by the balls— just like the ones you neglected to identify.

Adapted from the original notebook fragment written by Rainer Maria Rilke in Spain in 1913. Evidently, this was needed. Because people need to be screamed at with proof. But he knew his friends. Before they were he knew them. And they knew that he would never leave them there, desolate. So he let his exhausted eyes close at first glimpse of the village fringed with tall fig trees — immediately he found himself in their midst: here was Martha, sister of the dead boy. He knew she would not stray, as he knew which would; he knew that he would always find her at his right hand, and beside her her sister Mary, the one a whole world of whores still stood in a vast circle pointing at. Yes, all were gathered around him. And once again he began to explain to bewildered upturned faces where it was he had to go, and why. He called them “my friends.” The Logos, God’s creating word, — the same voice that said Let there be light. Yet when he opened his eyes, he found himself standing apart. Even the two slowly backing away, as though from concern for their good name. Then he began to hear voices; whispering quite distinctly, or thinking: Lord, if you had been here our friend might not have died

Incomprehensible fate that sentenced my father to my mother. I can’t blame him, I would have left the raving bitch myself, and would do so many many times in years to come. Then, of course, I came along. There is a limit to what one man can endure. So I suppose I am the reason he left, actually. I am the one to blame. And yet he did his best; he did all that he was capable of doing, and wrote me every year, like clockwork. He rarely remembered to mail what he wrote me, poor man (when I think of what I must have put him through), barely legible one-sentence postcards he sometimes worked at half the night; but as they all said the same thing, word for word, it wasn’t that bad. He could be forgiven.The blizzard I visit your city disguised as will never be over and never arrive. I think what he was trying to say was that at some point I’d begin to notice I was freezing, wasn’t dressed right, had nowhere to go, and was staggering into a blinding snow that no one else could see. I think he meant, the cold will make you what I am today.

Pure gaze, you are lightning beyond the last trees and you are the last trees’ past, branching green lightning of terminal brain branches numened densely with summer’s hunter color, as night comes on, the ocean they conceal gone berserk, wind still rising. Pure seeing, dual vortex doors to the blue fire where sex is burned away, and all is as it was and I am being offered in your eyes, as in cupped hands, the water of to never thirst again. Again I turn away, and the future comes, all at once towering around me on every side, and I am lost. Pure looking, past pain (this is promised): we must have wed on poverty’s most hair-raising day delighting, flashing risk, risk unfailingly lighting the way, anything possible in that dissolving of seam between minds, no more golden time— each step I took the right step, words came to me finally and finding the place you had set for them, once again wrote themselves down. Till true word’s anvil ring, and solid tap of winged blind cane come, I wish you all the aloneness you hunger for. That big kitchen table where you sit laughing with friends, I see it happening. And I wish that I could not be so much with you when I’m suddenly not; that inwardly you might switch time, to sleep and winter while you went about your life, until you woke up well, our conversation resumed. Ceaseless blue lightning, this love passing through me: I know somehow it will go on reaching you, reaching you instantly when I’m not in the way; when it is no longer deflected by all the dark bents, all I tried to overcome but I could not— so much light pulled off course as it passed within reach, so much lost, lost in me, but no more. October

Morning arrives unannounced by limousine: the tall emaciated chairman of sleeplessness in person steps out on the sidewalk and donning black glasses, ascends the stairs to your building guided by a German shepherd. After a couple faint knocks at the door, he slowly opens the book of blank pages pointing out with a pale manicured finger particular clauses, proof of your guilt.