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  • The World, and: Unfinishables, and: Maybe Tomorrow
  • Franz Wright (bio)

The World

Forget the world and then forget that word.

From things about to disappear be one who turned away in time.

The instrument can’t hear the music.

And the music cannot change a thing.

Change your heart, that is sufficiently improbable—

Change your heart and do your little time.

Unfinishables

1. The Strangers

Caducean their limbs entwining, wielded though by what [End Page 149]

and to what purpose, neither knew (name me someone who knows).

2. Dreamt Words

Rodent doll, we begin to affix the black petals to its feet and little hands.

The gallows are in bloom.

3. Stepfather

I still wake in rage, all these years later, a lust to crack the big heavy bald egg of your skull against the wall, exulting—

and so you live on.

4. Parent

His one-sentence postcards, could they be delivered, would all read The blizzard I [End Page 150] visit disguised as willnever arrive andwill never beover.

5. Contagion

I am gimp, I am misspell. I am Kind, I am kränkliches Lächeln.

Don’t touch me, I am drown.

Am room of never leave—

6. The World of Men

Faceless each in his mask made of mirror, in his armor of mirror.

7. Medicine Cabinet

Late at night I am awakened to take my body to the bathroom. There I will feed it two or three pills, if it is in actual pain; if the road leading back to its life is looking something like an open wound being slowly unbandaged— When sadly the good hours have ceased to outnumber the evil, I take it by the arm. [End Page 151] For the day is coming when all the masks will at last be torn away from the true face, healed or not— our identical faces.

8. On a Poetic Fashion of the Late Twentieth Century

No more gratuitous non sequiturs, you said late last night driving, no more

smirking ironies; no more claustrophobic

obscurities for obscurity’s sake: Nomore, oh

little future hank of blonde-haired

skull, from solitary— yours

to mine—our tapped out code.

9. Parousia

John 12: 910 Day when all the dead come forth not just the one poor guy who’s only going to die again anyway. [End Page 152] Man, a white light where the face should go,

when?

When.

10. Divided World

World divided into faces that say something irreparable has occurred, and the ones that soon will.

11. Odd Numbers

Unfathomable fate that sentenced my father and mother to marriage, and me.

Although to be fair, and speaking in the name of adolescents everywhere (including Milton’s Satan):

refresh, will you, faltering memory: [End Page 153] at what point did I ask to be born?

12. Momentum

Day before the final snow; pigeon with one crippled foot who lands on the bench, sidles over and looks right into my eyes. Waiting alertly in the park for X, who doesn’t show.

Maybe Tomorrow

The spilled blood went on flowing in my veins, for the time being. Words

continued to provide me with a life while destroying mine—

On tv the same giggling soft porn stars reporting the day’s major news:

of inflicting pain nobody tired.

Christ did not return, not as child, not as fire. [End Page 154]

Franz Wright

Franz Wright’s Walking to Martha’s Vineyard received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2004. He has a new collection called Wheeling Motel due out in September.

“I was born in 1953, making me at least five years too late to be a real hippie, but I did my best. Amazingly I have survived to the age of fifty-five: there was a general opinion among everyone who knew me when I was young, one to which I eagerly subscribed, that I was never going to make it to twenty-five.”

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