Beforelife: Poems - Franz Wright

"Empty Cathedral" There's this pew at the back that's been waiting for you all your life, like your death bed. Christ Criminal hanging above, eyes and mouth closed suggesting before you too enter the third person, light one candle for the here, will you. -------------------------------------------------------------------- "Thanks Prayer at the Cove" A year ago today I was unable to speak one syntactically coherent thought let alone write it down: today in this dear and absurdly allegorical place by your grace I am here and not in that graveyard, its skyline visible now from the November leaflessness and I am here to say it's 5 o'clock, too late to write more (especially for the one whose eyes are starting to get dark), the single dispirited swan out on the windless brown transparent floor floating gradually backward blackward no this is what I still can see, white as a joint in a box of little cigars- and where is the mate Lord, it is almost winter in the year 2000 and now I look up to find five practically unseeable mallards at my feet they have crossed nearly standing on earth they're so close looking up to me for bread- that's what my eyes of flesh see (barely) but what I wished to say is this, listen: a year ago today I found myself riding the subway psychotic (I wasn't depressed, I wanted to rip my face off) unable to write what I thought, which was nothing though I tried though I finally stopped trying and looked up at the face of the man directly across from me, and it began to melt before my eyes and in an instant it was young again the face he must have had once when he was five and in an instant it happened again only this time it changed to the face of his elderly corpse and back in time it changed to his face at our present moment of time's flowing and then as if transparently superimposed I saw them all at once OK I was insane but how insane can someone be I thought, I did not know you then I didn't know you were there God (that's what we call you, grunt grunt) as you are at every moment everywhere of what we call the future and the past And then I tried once more experimentally I focused on another's face, no need to describe it there is only one underneath these scary and extremely realistic rubber masks and there is as I also know now by your grace one and only one person on earth beneath a certain depth the terror and the love are one, like hunger, same in everyone and it happened again, das Ungluck geschah you might say nur mir allein it happened no matter who I looked at for maybe five minutes long enough long enough this secret trinity I saw, the others will say I am making it up as if that mattered Lord, I make up nothing not one word.Wright, Franz is the author of 'Beforelife: Poems - Franz Wright' with ISBN 9780375411540 and ISBN 0375411542.