F Poems

"I'm really looking forward to inheriting the world I have heard so much about," Wright declares in "Entries of the Cell," the long middle poem of his 13th collection. "Cross of Hiroshima// ash traced on a forehead.// The black dove sent out and still out there." Here, Wright looks back on a life of writing ("Awareness of existing in a universe where death is real came to him in the form of music"), and forward to a vague afterlife-what he calls the "step to take beyond the final step." But first there's the "slippery, gory, and unspeakable slaughterhouse," where "The truth is I'm not feeling so good;// and to judge from their expressions neither is anyone else." Wright's vulgar wit is once again on full display, in short and long poems, and a wandering prose of associative brutality. He takes time to reflect ("Music's an idealized and/ disembodied nervous system"), to question ("When you die the world/ is going to die, the world/ and all the stars-// what dies when you are born?"), and to resign: "I signed my name./ It's death's move." (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

LEAVE ME HIDDEN I was having trouble deciding which to watch: Night of the Living Bloggers, or Attack of the Neck-Brace People. In the end I just went for a walk. In the woods I stopped wondering why of all trees this one: my hand pressed to fissures and ridges of bark's hugely magnified fingerprint, forehead resting against it finally, feeling distinctly a heartbeat, vast, silently booming there deep in my hidden leaves, blessed motherworld, personal underworld, thank you thank you. LAMP Evening street of midnight blue with here and there a lighted window. Of the at home, or the possibly not. Concentrically into the air whose blue sphere gradually gives way to pure lethal space, wave after wave of a pale cadmium yellow expanding into emptiness and past the blood-brain barrier. Lamp manufactured unwittingly in the image of its maker the mind, which goes on emitting dim rays from its frail bulb of skull, from its insignificant and evidently random sector of an infinite place all its own; mind illuminating not much: seen, say, from its own frozen and excommunicated Pluto, it is nearly indistinguishable from any other. All minds are pretty much the same, they'll tell you so themselves, but secretly each is devoted to the conviction that it is irreparably different from all the rest--­in fact, it is this in which they are most fundamentally alike. Excerpted from F: Poems by Franz Wright All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.