Franz Wright

A genre-bending collection of prose poems from Pulitzer Prize–winner Franz Wright brings us surreal tales of childhood, adolescence, and adult awareness, moving from the gorgeous to the shocking to a sense of peace. Wright’s most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet. In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured “yes” of creation—“it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last,” Wright tells us. He introduces us to the powerful presences in his world (the haiku master Basho, Nietzsche, St. Teresa of Avila, and especially his father, James Wright) as he explores the continually unfolding loss of childhood and the mixed blessings that follow it. Taken together, the pieces deliver the diary of a poet—“a fairly good egg in hot water,” as he describes himself—who seeks to narrate his way through the dark wood of his title, following the crumbs of language. “Take everything,” Wright suggests, “you can have it all back, but leave for a little the words, of all you gave the most mysteriously lasting.” With a strong presence of the dramatic in every line, Kindertotenwald pulls us deep into this journey, where we too are lost and then found again with him.

Prose Poems

Kindertotenwald

i'm going to hurl myself into the fucking sea <3

lianna

How much you have longed for these crooked and overgrown paths overlooking a violent sky, a bright stormy sea. Kore, how much you have longed for: blind girl one step from the cliff’s edge making your sure way, the wind your hair, your solitary smile dark crimson poppies no one’s ever looked at. Which one are you, Kore? How can you tell for sure if you’re allowed to be alive this month? Is there anything here that stands out, dear to you, something you can’t bear to part with? Will you recall it, Kore, when you resume the throne above the leaden and motionless sea?

AND IF THE WORLD CANNOT BE SAVED MAY EACH BE SAVED IN SECRET FROM THE WORLD!! franz i am FOAMING AT THE MOUTH i am GOING INSANE!!!

If we come from the ocean, first we came from the sky. Tell me, remind me. This sky is all the heaven I am able to imagine. Remind me, until I am changed: once here we remain always here, in your universe, breathing the breath the changed left us, my body already the leaves overhead and grass to be walked on, someplace hidden away, or maybe the surf, where someone not born yet will walk alone and undress; this flesh is your shadow, remind me. Let me feel you’re near to bless me, one of the women come to the tomb early, while it is still dark, only to find that the stone has been moved from the space where the corpse had been laid, and that the space is empty, and you are standing at its entrance next to the other who is silently weeping. He has been waiting for her, crouching down and working in the earth as if he were the gardener; and without looking up at her face, he asks why she is crying. Only yesterday, she replies, the teacher’s body was laid in this tomb; but the stone has been moved, and his body is not there. Sir, please tell me what they have done with it. Then he stood up and said, Mary? From the four corners of the world and this room, bellying curtain who stands nearby, where I am lying ill, never to leave, bride of the child. No need to leave the place of peace, faceless Mother in sorrow, printless feet, weightless touch; wings of the separate address book my friend kept, then, in the stranger time, the unending Greyhound trip, boyhood with no boy and early manhood with nothing but. It is all forever written down on a page in your keeping, the palm of my hand: outworld the world time, outheartless the heartless, so much meaningless fear, fear filling the sky, why, why this insane waste of time, the whole world one faithless Gethsemane—now destination, true north, and only home. Unforget me this day, but stay where you are. No need to come dressed in the colors of water, friend I meet everywhere, mother of starry blue space; and if the world cannot be saved, may each be saved in secret from the world. Don’t waste a death on me; let me come to you

Kindertotenwald quotes

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