Wednesday, April 28, 2004


Childhood's Appointment — Franz Wright


I am blind, but it seems to me the street meanders, it seems to
wish itself to sea.

But we're climbing now, I have come to stand on a great height
overlooking
the white city

silver mirror-glare of bay, of

the goodbye
against which nobody with pride would dare plead—

Here's hope you are well into your blessed summer

Cockroach befriended by the insane prisoner

At the wedding there weren't many guests

Visible ones, anyway

Then the beautiful hidden and infinite winter comes. . .

The closer I get to death, the more I love the earth, the thought
introduced itself as I sat shivering on my old park bench before
the dusk fog; as it has, I suppose, to every human being
who has ever lived
past forty.

A wingless, male, scared-looking angel of about sixteen—nobody
wants to see that

Prow of my father's bald unbuilt house parting the stars



Letter — Franz Wright


January 1998


I am not acquainted with anyone
there, if they spoke to me
I would not know what to do.
But so far nobody has, I know
I certainly wouldn't.
I don't participate, I'm not allowed;
I just listen, and every morning
have a moment of such happiness, I breathe
and breathe until the terror returns. About the time
when they are supposed to greet one another
two people actually look into each other's eyes
and hold hands a moment, but
the church is so big and the few who are there
are seated far apart. So this presents no real problem.
I keep my eyes fixed on the great naked corpse, the vertical
corpse
who is said to be love
and who spoke the world
into being, before coming here
to be tortured and executed by it.
I don't know what I am doing there. I do
notice the more I lose touch
with what I previously saw as my life
the more real my spot in the dark winter pew becomes—
it is infinite. What we experience
as space, the sky
that is, the sun, the stars
is intimate and rather small by comparison.
When I step outside the ugliness is so shattering
it has become dear to me, like a retarded
child, precious to me.
If only I could tell someone.
The humiliation I go through
when I think of my past
can only be described as grace.
We are created by being destroyed.