Free Earlier Poems by Franz Wright Page A

feign curiosity about the whole process to mask your indignation at being placed in this situation.
    Sure, you see lots of pretty butterflies with the faces of ancient Egyptian queens, and so forth—you see other things, too.
    Flying stingray vaginas all over the place, along with a few of their male counterparts transparently camouflaged as who knows what pillars and swords out of the old brains unconscious.
    You keep finding yourself thinking, God damn it, don't tell me that isn't a pussy!
    But after long silence come out with, “Oh, this must be Christ trying to prevent a large crowd from stoning a woman to death.”
    The thing to do is keep a straight face, which is hard. After all, you're
supposed to
be crazy
    (and are probably proving it).
    Maybe a nudge and a chuckle or two wouldn't hurt your case. Yes,
    it's some little card game you've gotten yourself into this time, when your only chance is to lose. Fold, and they have got you by the balls—
    just like the ones you neglected to identify.

Reunion
    Movement of the hour hand, dilating
of the rose …
Once I could write those.
What am I? A skull
    biting its fingernails, a no one
with nowhere to be
consulting his watch,
a country music station left on quietly
    all night, the motel door left open
to Wheeling's rainy main street, the river
and wind
and every whiskey-breathed
    ghost in the family—
left open,
old man,
for you.

Depiction of Childhood
    It is the little girl guiding the minotaur with her free hand— that devourer
    and all the terror he's accustomed to effortlessly emanating, his ability to paralyze merely by becoming present,
    entranced somehow, and transformed into a bewildered and who knows, grateful gentleness …
    and with the other hand lifting her lamp.

Night Watering
    A big velvet-brown moth
with an eye on each wing, asleep
right in the middle of
the sunflower, its antennae stirring
lightly now and then. We are alone
on this dim barely window-lit street—
stirring, maybe because of the light
breeze or a semiattentiveness
to my presence in its trance,
an inability to decide
if something's really there,
combined with a total indifference
since it has found at last its golden
temple of the myriad gold chambers
and its god. The flower
has virtually tripled in size
since bursting into bloom a week ago, in fact
it's grown so huge it is in danger
of breaking its own neck.
(It reminds me of someone we know.)
I spend about an hour
rummaging around the back porch
for twine and poles and so forth—it's beginning
to get blue out now—and finally
manage to prop up the head
so it will be comfortable.
At this point I am beginning
to appreciate the cool, still night
and it is almost gone. Now the moth
all this time has not budged
    from its spot, it will not be disturbed
at its devotions. I stand in my own
fascination and envy, more
difficult to break at this point.
At last I return
to the house from this four o'clock watering,
happy for once
to have something important to tell you
when you wake up, when I
lie watching while the golden
petals of your eyes begin stirring, then
startlingly open
all pupil, meet mine
and cannot decide what I am
or if I'm really there.

Planes
    Dream clock—next port of entry— …
    By diurnal moonlight, by dream clock, by star-blueprint it approaches
    *
    Over here they are sharpening
the seeing-eye
knife,
etc.
    *
    Her hand on my
shoulder without a name
    *
    Tempus fuckit
    *
    Funny, I sometimes feel like a motherless child (trad.) too, unknown black voice
    *
    Friends never met
    Put in the dark to hear no lark
    *
    Heart with a miner's face
    *
    Poem, my afterlife
    Blue underwater statuary
    And when the sky gives up its dead …
    *
    Thank you, I've just received yours
    Unless all these years
    I've been misunderstanding
    the verses. In any event
    I'll scratch your back, you knife mine
    *
    And when the sky gives up its dead
    And the dead rise blind and groping
around for scattered bones, the skulls
they don like helmets
before setting