April 19, 2010: Letter, Franz Wright
Letter
Franz Wright
January 1998
I am not acquainted with anyone
there, if they spoke to me
I would not know what to do.
But so far nobody has, I know
I certainly wouldn’t.
I don’t participate, I’m not allowed;
I just listen, and every morning
have a moment of such happiness, I breathe
and breathe until the terror returns. About the time
when they are supposed to greet one another
two people actually look into each other’s eyes
and hold hands a moment, but
the church is so big and the few who are there
are seated far apart. So this presents no real problem.
I keep my eyes fixed on the great naked corpse, the vertical corpse
who is said to be love
and who spoke the world
into being, before coming here
to be tortured and executed by it.
I don’t know what I am doing there. I do
notice the more I lose touch
with what I previously saw as my life
the more real my spot in the dark winter pew becomes—
it is infinite. What we experience
as space, the sky
that is, the sun, the stars
is intimate and rather small by comparison.
When I step outside the ugliness is so shattering
it has become dear to me, like a retarded
child, precious to me.
If only I could tell someone.
The humiliation I go through
when I think of my past
can only be described as grace.
We are created by being destroyed.
==
[You can hear Franz Wright discuss the context of this poem and read it here, beginning at timestamp 6:50. He says this poem is about a time in his life when he “was led to a point where I really had no choice but to die or to try to come back to life somehow”.
Like many of the poems in Franz Wright’s Pulitzer-prize winning book Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, this is about finding redemption in Catholicism after a life of alcoholism, mental illness and drug addiction. More of his poems:
The Only Animal
The Poem
Publication Date]
On this day in…
2009: 23rd Street Runs Into Heaven, Kenneth Patchen
2008: HOUSEHOLD ACTIVITY NO. 26, J.R. Quackenbush
2007: from Briggflatts, Basil Bunting
2006: The Chores, Frannie Lindsay
2005: Direct Address, Joan Larkin
