The Beforelife Read online

  ALSO BY FRANZ WRIGHT

  Poetry

  Tapping the White Cane of Solitude (1976)

  The Earth Without You (1980)

  8 Poems (1981)

  The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes (1982)

  Going North in Winter (1986)

  Entry in an Unknown Hand (1989)

  And Still the Hand Will Sleep in Its Glass Ship (1991)

  Midnight Postscript (1992)

  The Night World & the Word Night (1993)

  Rorschach Test (1995)

  Ill Lit: Selected & New Poems (1998)

  Knell (1999)

  God While Creating the Birds Sees Adam in His Thoughts (2001)

  Hell & Other Poems (2001)

  The Beforelife (2001)

  Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (2003)

  Translations

  Jarmila. Flies: Ten Prose Poems by Erica Pedretti (1976)

  The Life of Mary (poems by Rainer Maria Rilke) (1981)

  The Unknown Rilke (1983)

  No Siege Is Absolute (poems by René Char) (1984)

  The Unknown Rilke: Expanded Edition (1991)

  I wrote these poems

  between December of 1998

  and December of 1999

  for my wife Elizabeth.

  F. W.

  CONTENTS

  Empty Cathedral

  Prescription

  Translation

  November 14

  Memoir

  Written with a Baseball Bat-Sized Pencil

  Not Now

  The Dead Dads

  The Midnight Snack

  I’m Sorry

  The Ascent of Midnight

  Body Bag

  The Beforelife

  Thanks Prayer at the Cove

  Accepting an Award

  Address Search

  Based on a Prayer of Rabi’a al-Adawiyya

  First Encounter/The City

  The Neighbor

  The Wedding

  Entry & Prayer

  The Poem Said

  New Page

  Doing a Line of Olga Broumas

  Communion

  After Apollinaire

  I for One

  Description of Her Eyes

  Tibetans Raped by Chinese Robots

  From a Discarded Image

  Self-Portrait at 40

  Scrolling Marquee

  Bathtub Improv

  Resurrection: Elegy

  Simultaneous Sentences

  Goodbye

  Slander

  Aesthetic

  When You See Fame Coming Run

  The Speaker

  Church

  Commercial for Absence

  Thinking of France

  The Way We Look to Them

  The Miracle

  Request

  Homage

  To a Blossoming Nut Case

  Learning a Language

  Fine Print

  Primogeniture

  Moving

  Planting

  PC Lullaby

  Dying Thought Near the Summit

  Empty Stage

  Clarification

  Nothingsville, MN

  Thus in the pursuit of consciousness it must be understood, first, that man must do everything by himself—that is, he must penetrate to another level solely by his own efforts; and second, he can do nothing by himself—that is, his whole endeavor must be to contact higher sources and levels of energy. For unless he succeeds in so doing, he will get nothing and can get nothing.

  Rodney Collin

  EMPTY CATHEDRAL

  There’s this pew

  at the back

  that’s been

  waiting

  for you

  all your life, like your death bed.

  Christ Criminal

  hanging

  above, eyes and mouth

  closed suggesting

  before you too enter

  the third person, light

  one candle

  for the here,

  will you.

  PRESCRIPTION

  While you lie in bed

  watching the movie

  of every last terrible

  thing you have done, you

  consider with high admiration

  and envy the one

  of unscared face

  and conscience come

  with his own slip of paper

  proclaiming

  bearer’s incontrovertible

  privilege to sleep,

  to ask

  and receive it

  right now

  by sidereal name.

  TRANSLATION

  Death is nature’s way

  of telling you to be quiet.

  Of saying it’s time

  to be weaned, your conflagration starved

  to diamond.

  I’ll give you something to cry about.

  And what those treetops swaying

  dimly in the wind spelled.

  NOVEMBER 14

  After church we had breakfast at a diner nearby, and when we got home provided a poor squirrel in our street with a burial: cardboard box, plastic bag, garbage can at the curb. He was perfect,

  a large, unmolested and sleeping-appearing squirrel with a little brilliant dark blood at its nostrils and the wind slightly lifting the gray and black hair on its tail and inside its small ear to make me cry.

  MEMOIR

  Just hope he forgot the address

  and don’t answer the phone

  for a week:

  put out all the lights

  in the house—

  behave like you aren’t there

  if some night when

  it’s blizzarding, you see

  Franz Wright arrive

  on your street with his suitcase

  of codeine pills,

  lugging that heavy

  black manuscript

  of blank texts.

  WRITTEN WITH A BASEBALL BAT-SIZED PENCIL

  You can meet them all

  here, these are the people

  who aren’t coming back:

  the young woman who lives in the room

  across the hall, the pretty blonde

  who enters in a speechless rage

  to leaf through your suitcase

  while you’re lying in bed and deny it

  when asked why, deny

  that she is there at all (“—don’t go telling tales on me”).

  The teenage stroke victim

  who keeps stuffing his clothes

  in his mother’s hamper

  at home, the black plastic

  refuse container

  in the bright sterilized

  kitchen we’re barred from when hungry

  between feedings, coming back

  to do it again

  each time they’re returned to him. Then

  there’s the seventy-year-old manic virgin

  who is having a hard time taking her eyes off

  your ass, mooning after you, floating

  downhall

  behind you wherever you turn—

  you can laugh

  until your heart stops, nothing’s

  capable of persuading her

  you aren’t the answer to her prayers;

  who secretly opens your door

  a crack in the blackness, she stays up all night

  gazing cadaverously down

  or she would

  if it weren’t for the guy in white come

  on the half hour shining

  his flashlight in your open eyes to see

  if you’ve killed yourself yet. And who knows,

  you might be one of them

  yourself

  by now, stranger
r />   things have happened—

  NOT NOW

  for Dzvinia Orlowsky

  Where is

  the man of heaven

  in me—

  my body’s

  filthy

  face and hands

  completely filthy

  with

  the man of dust

  This mask

  this glove

  of human flesh

  is all I have

  and that’s not bad

  and that’s not good

  not good enough

  not now

  THE DEAD DADS

  It’s easier to get a rope

  through the eye of a needle than

  the drunk son of a drunk

  into stopping

  into waking—oh no, not

  this guy he’s intent on

  finding out and finding out

  exactly

  what the poor old fucker felt like

  and hell,

  all he has asked

  is one good cold responsible

  look at the corpse

  when it meets him, living,

  at the door— …

  THE MIDNIGHT SNACK

  It was night, I was

  having a fairly nice time

  for a cockroach

  in a psychiatrist’s kitchen—

  chewing in the blackness,

  a terrified but unmolested listening.

  A bargain,

  I remember thinking,

  at twice the price I paid;

  perhaps I shall injure myself

  and require an injection for pain.

  A hungry ghost at any age.

  But it was night, and it would be

  for the time being,

  I was doing all right.

  I’M SORRY

  Child I helped

  to do away with

  you would be

  almost an adult now

  I hope my friend

  Like me you never got to have your childhood

  You never even got to exist

  yet

  you still bear the name

  I gave you

  again for my benefit

  mindlessly

  after your death

  your cheap and meaningless

  banishment

  forgive me

  THE ASCENT OF MIDNIGHT

  Sometimes I’d like to give up—

  I want to blindfold this head

  put a gun to it, and say

  shitface

  this is the way

  you caused me to feel

  nearly all the time.

  But what is the use of that type

  of behavior. I’m getting so tired, and I’m nowhere

  nowhere near

  my illustrious friends (yet

  I’m still fairly high

  in the mountains

  beneath the sea …)

  BODY BAG

  Like the condom in a pinch one size fits all.

  THE BEFORELIFE

  for Thomas Lux

  Meanwhile,

  I visit the word world.

  In between feeding my friends,

  the alert preternaturally unafraid

  birds

  of Purgatory Cove.

  THANKS PRAYER AT THE COVE

  A year ago today

  I was unable to speak

  one syntactically coherent

  thought let alone write it down: today

  in this dear and absurdly allegorical place

  by your grace

  I am here

  and not in that graveyard, its skyline

  visible now from the November leaflessness

  and I am here to say

  it’s 5 o’clock, too late to write more

  (especially for the one whose eyes

  are starting to get dark), the single

  dispirited swan out on the windless brown

  transparent floor floating

  gradually backward

  blackward

  no this is what I still

  can see, white

  as a joint in a box of little cigars—

  and where is the mate

  Lord, it is almost winter in the year

  2000 and now I look up to find five

  practically unseeable mallards at my feet

  they have crossed

  nearly standing on earth they’re so close

  looking up to me

  for bread—

  that’s what my eyes of flesh see (barely)

  but what I wished to say

  is this, listen:

  a year ago today

  I found myself riding the subway psychotic

  (I wasn’t depressed, I wanted to rip my face off)

  unable to write what I thought, which was nothing

  though I tried though I finally stopped trying and

  looked up

  at the face of the man

  directly across from me, and it began

  to melt before my eyes

  and in an instant it was young again

  the face he must have had

  once when he was five

  and in an instant it happened again only this

  time

  it changed to the face of his elderly

  corpse and back in time

  it changed

  to his face at our present

  moment of time’s flowing and then

  as if transparently

  superimposed I saw them all at once

  OK I was insane but how insane

  can someone be I thought, I did not

  know you then

  I didn’t know you were there God

  (that’s what we call you, grunt grunt)

  as you are at every moment

  everywhere of what we call

  the future and the past

  And then I tried once more

  experimentally

  I focused

  on another’s face, no need to describe it

  there is only one

  underneath

  these scary and extremely

  realistic rubber masks

  and there is as I also know now

  by your grace one

  and only one person on earth

  beneath a certain depth

  the terror and the love

  are one, like hunger, same

  in everyone

  and it happened again, das Unglück geschah

  you might say nur mir allein it happened

  no matter who I looked at

  for maybe five minutes long enough

  long enough

  this hidden trinity

  I saw, the others

  will say I am making it up

  as if that mattered

  Lord,

  I make up nothing

  not one word.

  ACCEPTING AN AWARD

  A voice

  neither cruel nor benevolent

  said—this

  was spring

  in 1996—

  look at him:

  he can’t live and pretends

  he is going to die …

  One eye in tears and one that’s never going to cry.

  And who could have foreseen I’d outevil them all,

  all my old evil friends

  put together?

  You,

  that’s who.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid

  and her boyfriend Why

  why, why.

  So welcome back.

  How have you been.

  And for this immense pleasure and honor

  what will I owe this time—?

  ADDRESS SEARCH

  And you will find me

  any night

  now, try

  at the motherless sky.

  com

  How dare you

  interrupt

  me.com

  I’
m sorry

  I was ever born.com

  No doubt

  you can always find

  me any

  time, any

  where

  in the damned world

  BASED ON A PRAYER OF RABI’A AL-ADAWIYYA