POETRY After ... Franz WRIGHT

“After”
Franz WRIGHT
From Earlier Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)


Where I am going now
I don’t yet know:
I have, it appears, no destination, no plan.
In fact no particular longing to go
on anymore, at the moment, the cold
weightless fingers encircling my neck
to make me recite, one more time,
the great reasons for being alive.

Permanent address: unknown.
In the first place, we are not convinced
I exist at all. And if I have
a job

it is to be that hour
when the birds who sing all night long wake
and cease one by one,
and the last stars blaze and go out.

It is to be the beam of morning in the room,

the traveler at your front door;
or, if you wake in the night,
the one who is not
at the door.

The one who can see, from far off,
what you hiddenly go through.

The hammer’s shadow in the shadow of a hand.

No one,
and the father of no one.


This poem first appeared in The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes (1982)