FRANZ WRIGHT :
unsayable and right here in the room
Transformation
It gets late early now
This is
when I like to visit
you at the top of your hidden
still green stairway, holy
Mother with the downcast
eyes as a girl of sixteen
almost unnoticed the right bare foot pinning
the serpent with the one-
leafed little apple in its jaws
poor thing, one is tempted
to say, so transformed
by its contact with you
is everything
—
From the Past
I suffer from insomnia, from loneliness I sleep. From the past I suffer,
and the imminence of some radiantly obvious thing I need to say, though
quite what that might be escapes me at the moment, as it always has, and
always will. And I can just see it: I'll be driven to the hospital for the
last time with my toothbrush and razor at about two in the afternoon, the
turnpike deserted, the lights of some new isolated office building beckoning
celestially on a distant hill. It smells like snow, I will say. I'm
saying. I said.
But who was I, so clearly it appeared to me that there was something else
than what I saw? Who did I imagine I was, that things as they are, reality
as God gave it, was not enough for me?
Progress
Nobody has called for some time.
(I was always the death of the party.)
In a way that leaves
a scar, I
no longer wish to love.
(Come a hairbreadth closer
to this shining
apparition and be consumed in flame.)
I'm still alone with all the world's
beauty and cruelty.
And I recall
everything,
everything's
here —
what is time? When
is the present?
I'm still here alone in the night hours with everyone.
And everything that once was
infinitely far
and unsayable is now
unsayable
and right here in the room.
|
|
|
(c) 2005 Slope. Slope
is ISSN # 1536-0164.
|
|
|