Poems of the Week

THREE POEMS BY FRANZ WRIGHT

For Frank Stanford

The scheming and chattering
mind’s abrupt sense
in the night of its being

surrounded by mind,
unendingly, starrily
dwarfed and encircled

by mind whose voice
is silence, utter
silence unequivocally

kind . . .
                   The first bird
talking to the last stars—

maybe it was you
who woke me today in the dark;
I know you’re still around here somewhere.

I love you, therefore you are here.
For the first time in days I got dressed;
and I walked outside this morning,

and I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

For Larry Levis

Among the dead I cannot find you.
Let me rest here a minute
beneath these six leaves, crippled
tree slightly taller than I am
in a Manhattan sidewalk like a streetlamp
in a forest where I’m lost.

Rosary

Mother of space,
inner

virgin
with no one face—

See them flying to see you
be near you,

when you
are everywhere.

* all poems from God’s Silence, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.