Earlier Poems Read Online Free PDF Page A

inevitable—
he will find himself staring right through them.
All the way down the untraveled
back road. And without even turning his head
on the pillow, past the crows' fields
through the first November snow,
the skeletal cornstalks' gold gleam
in the woods, in what's left
of the sun.
The time has arrived to get drunk,
he's decided.
He has never done this before
and so figures he'll just mix them all:
half a glass of something dark,
then one of something transparent, in a big jar.
He fills up this jar maybe twice
and maybe more than twice,
drinking it down as if it were water—
drowning in desperate green nausea, and wondering
what it will be like when it happens.
It is harder to tell, he supposes,
when no one is there;
but he's certain that his face is altered.
Into that of someone related to him, living
a long time before he was born;
perhaps it's changed back to his old face, or forward
in time, it's the face God had prepared.
There's been some massive reconstruction
no matter how you part your hair,
but the mirrors—you cannot look into them
since each has become a starless abyss
someone is sure to fall into.
They ought to put sheets over all of them.
The telephone begins to ring:
a brief game of Russian roulette?
He has five or six seconds to decide.
Now he's going to get to hear a little music.
It seems to be a bird's voice: one
he has never heard before, or noticed.
It's producing a kind of high fugue in the octaves beyond
which nobody can hear;
he feels he could listen forever,
except he's lost the power to shut it off.
That makes a difference. You have to
watch out for these figures of speech, don't you think.
He opens his eyes all at once,
the noon sun turning everything to a white blindness.
He slowly sits up in the dead corn stubble,
all the while gazing around;
a few silent crows perched nearby
on their stalks
incuriously staring—
crows with stars for eyes.
It is snowing lightly and the moon-sized sun burns white.
It appears he is fully dressed under his coat,
someone has put his gloves on,
thoughtful. He notices he's even wearing
that ridiculous Christmas scarf
his mother knitted the year he got tall
but not tall enough to keep
from stepping on it now and then,
incurring the mirth of all.
The one he hanged himself with.
He turns his head.
The house is gone. He is relieved to note
the little Olivetti
like a miniature suitcase
placed beside him on the frozen ground.
A hangover isn't so bad—
one feels extremely courageous and lucid,
apparently.
And you need no one.
He thumbed a ride at this point, clearly.
It had been written down
for years,
it had already happened.
It suddenly occurs to him
that the element of grammar they call
tense, like time itself, has always been
falsely assumed to reflect some demonstrable
facet of reality—that word.
As if there were just one.
Then there's the problem of your watch,
weight, age, and height
in eternity.
Let Augustine worry about it.
The glorious future awaited him,
or awaits him, the future
perfect, too. His life—
it had begun at last, and high time. It has been over so long.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    The author would like to thank James Randall and Gerald Costanzo, the editors of Pym-Randall Press and Carnegie Mellon University Press, who first published in book form the poems contained in this collection. He also wishes to thank David Young of Oberlin College Press for publishing
III Lit: Selected & New Poems
, in which many of these poems have remained in print through the years.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Franz Wright's most recent works include
God's Silence, Walking to Martha's Vineyard
(which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry),
The Beforelife
(a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), and
III Lit: Selected & New Poems.
He has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship, and the PEN / Voelcker Prize for Poetry, among other honors. He currently lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, with his wife, the translator