Rooms

Rooms I (I will not say

worked in) once heard in. Words

my mouth heard

then—be

with me. Rooms,

you open onto one

another: still house

this life, be in me

when I leave

[Franz Wright, Entry In An Unknown Hand]

sharing is caring

i was lying in bed the other night reading some poetry. even though i don’t read a ton of poetry, there are a few poets that i really enjoy. franz wright is one of them.

i was reading about wright’s latest book of poetry, and one reviewer mentioned that his poem, my pew, might be the best poem about the trials and possibilities of faith he’s ever read. high praise, considering wright’s a pulitzer prize winner that’s written a lot of amazing stuff about faith already, so i decided to track that particular piece down.

since i found it, i’ve read it over and over again. i love the economy of words, the sparseness, the series of soft vowel sounds, the synesthesia of light’s long labyrinthine whispers, the use of the word gentian, all the biblical language that brings in a whole other world to bear on the poem, and the series of pounding questions, punctuated by the last one that floors me over again with each additional reading. i stop and think about the overall effect of the poem as a piece of art, and just like i often do when i see an incredible basketball shot, i can’t help but wonder to myself, how did he do that?

i really love the poem. and what’s better, i posted it on my door and told my students that it changed my life, and now i’m often seeing the kids huddled outside my door trying to analyze and understand the endless layers of this art. the only thing better than enjoying an amazing piece is sharing it with others.

My Pew by Franz Wright

I love this
window
way in the back
in early gentian morning
down which light’s long
labyrinthine whispers
reach my ear, I
would like to describe it to someone,
to myself, my blind companion—
Why did I turn to this
forsakenness again?
Are You
just a word?

Are we beheld, or am I all alone? And

as that little girl on the psych ward
recently asked her father,
When I am very old

can I come back
home, and
will you be there?

the only animal

this morning
I stood once again
in this world, the garden
ark and vacant
tomb of what
I can’t imagine,
between twin eternities,
some sort of wings,
more or less equidistantly
exiled from both,
hovering in the dreaming called
being awake, where
You gave me
in secret one thing
to perceive, the
tall blue starry
strangeness of being
here at all.

You gave us each in secret something to perceive.

Furless now, upright, My banished
and experimental
child

You said, though your own heart condemn you

I do not condemn you.

[franz wright - walking to martha's vineyard]