Franz Wright

From the third floor window you watch the mailman’s slow progress through the blowing snow. As he goes from door to door he might be searching for a room to rent, unsure of the address, which he keeps stopping to check in the outdated and now obliterated clipping he holds, between thickly gloved fingers, close to his eyes in a hunched and abruptly simian posture that makes you turn away, quickly switching off the lamp.

From my cell I was staring at a cloud, a dog decaying in the woods, etc., as I took up the long-awaited sequel to my Confessions. By this time my hand was so far away that it looked like a small hairless spider whose progress I could hardly help but follow, from the corner of one eye, as it went on filling page after page in a notebook the size of a stamp with words too small for anyone to read. I looked up and noticed my bars had turned to gold. And before I forget, I’d like to be the first to congratulate everyone who has not committed suicide up until now. Camouflaged and lightless congregation, the world will never know your names, never know of its debt to you, or what you suffered; with what uncomplaining anguish you sacrificed the one thing all hold most dear, most have in common, the sense of being completely different from anybody else—it just vanished at some point, having attained its sexually mature and winged stage. You had a great vision about it, but told no one.We have misnamed death life and life death. You saw another world, and it was precisely the same as this one. This time you told everyone, until someone asked you very nicely to quiet down. And the weather—everything you have heard on that subject is a serious understatement. The scarlet horrors were preparing to file in for my ignominious obsequies, already they swarmed freely over my body. Then, there was no weather. I can’t tell you how perfect that was. As it happens I had been gazing up at the dusk stars, as I can be found doing more or less day and night, for I like to think they are growing younger as I die, come by some time and tell me what you think. Under torture—some atrocious form of tickling, for example—I guess I’d describe myself as a fairly good egg in hot water. Family motto roughly translates,April wizards bring May blizzards. We tend to be apprehended eventually, after a futile but all the more spirited attempt at first degree self-impersonation; however, this is not the time for levity, we happen to be speaking of a serious medical goodnight kiss. Traditionally, we are then detained at a local mental facility known for its celebrated alumni, though in recent decades secret and permanent socialist elements in the government have seen to it that the lowest scum of humanity now appear to have open access to those once hallowed halls smeared with our shit and vomit. What I’m getting at is this: after a relatively brief stay, we are invariably released with some deranged doctor’s or other’s blessing, a mixture of relief and disgust on the part of the staff, and the secret eye-signal that will get you into any movie house in Milwaukee free for the next year. Some of us like to get together once a day, rain or shine, and gather furtively at the picnic grounds under those tall wavering candleflame pines, where neither moth nor rust can reach, nor faintest scream, and exchange ribald tales verging on satanic perversion, each drawing his iridescent injection from the same oceanic martini, very dry, about two tears’ worth of vermouth, in an unremembered dream.

Is there a single thing in nature that can approach in mystery the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then its transformation from childhood to old age— We are surrounded at every instant by sights that ought to strike the sane unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute with gratitude and terror. 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, they would not understand. 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 origins, 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.

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested. By some inexplicable oversight nobody jeers when I walk down the street. I have been allowed to go on living in this room. I am not asked to explain my presence anywhere. What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and are any left unexecuted? Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking certain jobs? They are absolutely shameless at the bank—— You’d think my name meant nothing to them. Non- chalantly they hand me the sum I’ve requested, but I know them. It’s like this everywhere—— they think they are going to surprise me: I, who do nothing but wait. Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up—— very clever. They think that they can scare me. I am always scared. And how much courage it requires to get up in the morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates you! At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and refuse to go on, it’s not done. I go on dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip, accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white laughter and applause, past a million unlighted windows, peered out at by the retired and their aged attack-dogs— toward my place, the one at the end of the counter, the scalpel on the napkin.

It’s true I never write, but I would gladly die with you.

Say I had no choice, this weightless finger touched my tongue and told me to, it taught me; when kinder and more subtle methods failed, it put a gun to my head, a zero seared coldly in one temple, electrode glued chill to the other, the sniffer dogs rooting and snuffling in my crotch, the small white doorless room, the laser flashlight in one eye. You can’t hear the voice when it utters let there be speech, yet I faithfully spoke what I thought I was supposed to, inspired idiot, or dummy on that lap of language, the words themselves more real than I, words here before we were and when we are not again. So I blurted it out, my initial soliloquies, what I could catch through the static, giving my head a good thump now and then like one of those black-and-white tv sets, and projecting, those were some vast stadiums, the first row of faces as far as near stars if there at all, never having the faintest idea what it meant, the microphone dead, I did my best, tell them. Inch-thick rope for ascot, eyes put out, chained to my oars, all the others long vanished: the first minute of death is so long, like the first minute of consciousness there in the infinite darkness of somebody weeping, you never arrive, never reach shore, never mind with what clarity you seem to hear with your lips distant roar of surf breaking. I pulled too for those who’d come later, I’m guessing, singing in their names as well, sort of lip-synching but singing twice as loud, strapped to the mast, earways cleared, though I heard nothing but nothing, blue. Making up what I couldn’t make out, and all that uproarious and pitiless derision I had to raise my voice above, I mere link—out on that unknown ocean beating at my ears, just as at the beginning, the mother’s heart booming softly; from nowhere it came, like me, months before I arrived to take up the sorry job of being me, whatever a month was, whatever I was then, blind little dolphin with a thumb in its mouth, whatever a mouth was; poor mother mourning her own mother’s dying, over the actual ocean she lay, a strong stone’s throw from the Ohio or that poisoned ghost of it. Mother of my mother dying away from this world just as I was about to die into it. I see them there, up to their knees, gathered as for a baptism, cross traced in hydrochloric acid on a tiny forehead, right there at the dead water’s edge a scythe of moon, a meteor in arc of falling axe of gold for the severing of hairy umbilical rope, hear me out! I saw they were standing watch over her, and my mother’s conspicuous absence, wincing at the constant cough; and I saw her whom I would never meet, nearing peace in the scarlet Magdalenean cerements, clenching lightly between thumb and skeletal forefinger the scarlet egg, and the wide river’s sundering undertow sucking to its breast her shrunken body, fetal in her narrow bed, nothing but a huckleberry craft by now just vanishing around the first bend, more and more lost from sight by my mother, twenty-two, unaided by lunatic male she’d been sentenced to, from Goethe-phase to Trakl-phase. And she breaks down in her hotel room, in bullet-pocked Vienna, helplessly swept down the blind unwept current still flowing, sadness’s chemistry, horror’s and guilt’s, to this day through my veins. Months before we met, I listening to her crying, it went on forever, how not hear it, how not be fed it, in a shoreless darkness of sorrowing I listened, still listen, now watch this and pay close attention: nothing else there, only a listening called me, no name even, till they grave it in stone. Until we finally met, I watched her face rise on the horizon. Then there was some loud mutual screaming in the even more terrible blindness called light. Long before I invented the first word it taught me, it told me the others, so many. So only what was never mine is mine; and when no one is listening I sing what it means to me, even now, hearing my voice through my own disappearing, farther away every day, my mother’s mother’s fate and mine now one as I board the ocean liner at three months of age and arrive in New York, filled with space and time.

Then he stopped dead on the sidewalk astounded to overhear himself say quite distinctly I quit, in his own words — be glad you weren’t there. Pandemonium in the cerebral combs, unprecedented mass desertions, solar flare-ups. It said itself actually; the lips moved not, no thought was taken. With massive finality and apropos of absolutely nothing it came, a cruel blessing, the ultimate low note of an organ made of ice or a passing night train of black holes. He kept lying there — what else was he supposed to do? — with watch pressed to one ear, emitting a molecular hum. (Ever wonder how they fit a whole hive inside one of them?) Minute hand starting to disappear, such was its speed by now; on his face an expression of guarded rapture. No one could do a thing for him now. They’d stop, gaze down in disgust and concern, a moment before they hurried on or, without looking, adroitly moved around him, the way you would dog shit. Invariably in such cases there is a line that no one crosses. You know what I’m getting at. Mainly everyone just stands around and waits for the arrival of the ambulance; the mind simply stops, nothing, silence. Then the most silver, the tiniest sound of a fracture like that of an ice cube dropped in vodka can be heard around the world; people freeze at whatever they’re doing, and bow their minds, those persistent illusions in pain, or shame. But all is soon forgotten, the sunlight appears all at once like a great shadow and floats with the gas-like hush throughout the twelve spokes, the brilliant yellow darkness of the twelve candlelit hallways forever abandoned, forever emanating out from the one central hexagonal chamber so much larger than all the rest, in which the young queen lies dreaming, amazed, eyes open wide inside her lead-lined matchbox rocking bed, tits up dead, immovable sow, maggot in color.

If I stare into it long enough, the point comes when I don’t know what it’s called, a condition in which lacerations are liable to occur, like a slip of the tongue; when a drop of blood might billow in a glass of water, blooming in velvet detonation and imparting to it the colorless, tasteless and originless fear in which I wake. 1975–2010

Unless a grain of wheat goes into the ground and dies, it remains nothing but a grain of wheat. —John 12:24 The ingredients gathered, a few small red tufts of the dream spoor per sheaf of Demeter’s blonde wheat, reaped in mourning, in silence, ground up with the pollen and mixed into white wine and honey. These stored forms of light taken under the ground. Taken by mouth. First those who by birth hold in secret the word; then placed on the tongues of the new ones, into whose ears it is meant to be whispered. Word murdered, forgotten so long ago, placed as a kiss on the lips of the soon-to-be-no-longer breathing who mean to enter death with open eyes, with mouths saying Death, what death? We have no word for it in our country where the bride of a brighter oblivion reigns. Not the purple-haired god but the child queen, the raped girl, come back from the dead hand in hand with the child she conceived there, returned in a resurrected virginity, wind through green wheat. Present-day site of a minor refinery in Christ. Although by the tenth generation already the children of light (“in their dark garments”) had trampled and smashed and generally raped the two thousand years of this precinct and its holy meal, intolerable mirror. Men who’d designed and bowed down to a law derived from the sayings of one who appeared here to say that the law is abolished, it is too late, all that is over with. Men who bungled their way through the next eighteen centuries before finally descending into the earth themselves, and what they found there they used, and we thank you for destroying the destroyers of the world. And here at the end this is as good as any other entrance to the underplace, journey of the fallen leaf back to the branch, to the bees of Eleusis among olive blossoms, untroubled among crimson wildflowers. Four thousand years later: same flowers, same bees.

Think of   a sheep knitting a sweater; think of   your life getting better and better. Think of   your cat asleep in a tree; think of   that spot where you once skinned your knee. Think of   a bird that stands in your palm. Try to remember the Twenty-first Psalm. Think of   a big pink horse galloping south; think of   a fly, and close your mouth. If   you feel thirsty, then drink from your cup. The birds will keep singing until they wake up.