F: Poems

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About the Author Franz Wright’s most recent works include Kindertotenwald and Wheeling Motel. His collection Walking to Martha’s Vineyard was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, and he has also been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Whiting Fellowship, among other honors. Wright lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, with his wife, the translator and writer Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright. Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. LEAVE ME HIDDEN I was having trouble deciding which to watch: Night of the Living Bloggers, or Attack of the Neck-Brace People. In the end I just went for a walk. In the woods I stopped wondering why of all trees this one: my hand pressed to fissures and ridges of bark’s hugely magnified fingerprint, forehead resting against it finally, feeling distinctly a heartbeat, vast, silently booming there deep in my hidden leaves, blessed motherworld, personal underworld, thank you thank you. LAMP Evening street of midnight blue with here and there a lighted window. Of the at home, or the possibly not. Concentrically into the air whose blue sphere gradually gives way to pure lethal space, wave after wave of a pale cadmium yellow expanding into emptiness and past the blood-brain barrier. Lamp manufactured unwittingly in the image of its maker the mind, which goes on emitting dim rays from its frail bulb of skull, from its insignificant and evidently random sector of an infinite place all its own; mind illuminating not much: seen, say, from its own frozen and excommunicated Pluto, it is nearly indistinguishable from any other. All minds are pretty much the same, they’ll tell you so themselves, but secretly each is devoted to the conviction that it is irreparably different from all the rest—­in fact, it is this in which they are most fundamentally alike. Read more