Woman Falling

It’s so strange you should suddenly be here, how did that happen, in your favorite place, that witchy old orange orchard, the very spot where it gives the impression of stretching forever in every direction, within sight of the three-story house, painted the same shade of white and, from here, right about the same size as this lone bee hive you stand looking down at a moment, no one has lived there for as long as you’ve known it, kept it a secret, parking off the highway and walking a mile down the nameless dirt road in a windy and shadowy brightness, the wind from the sun you would say, in your mind, if I know you, as of course I do not, not really, and never will now, no one will, you have made sure of that, but I can picture you saying it,  I’m not bothering anyone, I don’t even know where it is, that’s the point, no one did, no one knew how to reach you, you are there, though, you were, in the one vacant room with a mattress you even spent a night sometimes, the southern California night wind blowing through the glassless windows over your body, over your hair, maybe God would let you be the wind, but I don’t know what God thinks either, I just like to think of you all at once finding yourself in that place, walking along, without anyone knowing, that was the haunting, that was always the fun, and stretching before you a whole day of wandering and singing alone in the instant right before the one in which your body meets the earth at last.

At the End

Bar of jackals shunned by jackals, the scaries that frighten the scaries. Summit meeting of leading deceased souls, where eyes do the talking, in an atmosphere, an opulence of fecal, lightless fear.  Blood-flecked mirrors in men’s room with the dimensions of confessionals.  How many will have bowed their shaved skulls before it in the blank and lengthy moment which preceded the deft inoculation?  

Franz Wright’s collections of poetry include The Beforelife, God’s Silence, and Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. His most recent collection is Wheeling Motel (Knopf, 2009). Among many other honors he has received a Whiting Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.