Earlier Poems Book

The collection includes poems from four of Franz Wright's early books: The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes , Entry In An Unknown Hand , The Night World and the Word Night , and Rorschach Test ...

From The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes ...

It is still more light
than glass.

*

Though it leans halfway
into the invisible
it has a seam,

like a dress;
it sings
when you blow into its lips.

*

Since it is so empty and clear
it fills up the imagination,
makes me want to bring some well water
in a sieve
after setting fire to the barn
with a magnifying glass in the moon.
- Old Bottle Found in the Cellar of an Abandoned Farmhouse, pg. 22

From Entry In An Unknown Hand ...

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.
By some inexplicable oversight

nobody jeers when I walk down the street.

I have been allowed to go on living in this
room. I am not asked to explain my presence
anywhere.

What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and
are any left unexecuted?

Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking
certain jobs?

They are absolutely shameless at the bank -
you'd think my name meant nothing to them. Non-
chalantly they hand me the sum I've requested,

but I know them. It's like this everywhere -

they think they are going to surprise me: I,
who do nothing but wait.

Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up -
very clever.

They think that they can scare me.

I am always scared.

And how much courage it requires to get up in the
morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates
you!

At no point in the day may I fell to my knees and
refuse to go on, it's not done.

I go on

dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip,

accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white
laughter and applause,

past a million unlighted windows, peered out at
by the retired and their aged attack dogs -

toward my place,

the one at the end of the counter,

the scalpel on the napkin.
- Entry in an Unknown Hand, pg. 83-84

From The Night World and the Word Night ...

Whether I grow old, betray my dreams, become a ghost

or die in flames
like Gram,
like Frank,
like Thomas James -

I think for a while I'll come back
as a guest to a childhood room
where the sun is the sun once again
and the wind in the trees is the wind
in the trees, and the summer afternoon
the endless summer afternoon
of books,
that only happiness.

I won't have written this.

Smell of leaves before rain, green

light that shines not
on, but from the
earth -

for me, too,

a hunger darkened the world,
and a fierce joy made it blaze
into unrecognizable beauty.
- Jamais Vu, pg. 124

From Rorschach Test ...

Undressing, after working all night,
the last thing I see is the room

in the house next door.
At four in the morning, a dark room

filled with that flickering
blue

so familiar, almost maternal
if you were born

in my generation:
this light

so intimate, reassuring you
that the world is still there

filled with friendly and beautiful people, people
who would like to give you helpful products -

adoring families -
funny Nazis . . .

Undressing, the
last thing I will see.
- Late Late Show, pg. 179