Quotes from Franz Wright

So we sit there together the mountain and me, Li Po said, until only the mountain remains.

All will be forgotten, everything you perceived, thought, dreamed, hoped, remembered . . . all the past all the crawling fucking coughing chestpounding nose-picking and deathward attempts to make real some desperate desire, like standing upright for a minute in the sun. The sun that will die.

But if they were condmened to suffer this unending torment, sooner or later wouldn't they become the holy?

The road to Emmaus is this world.

In real life it's the living who haunt you. — Franz Wright, from section 1 of "Observations," Earlier Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

Ressurection of the little apple tree outside my window, leaf- light of late in the April called her eyes, forget forget— but how How does one go about dying? Who on earth is going to teach me— The world is filled with people who have never died

Auto-Lullaby Think of a sheep knitting a sweater; think of your life getting better and better. Think of your cat asleep in a tree; think of that spot where you once skinned your knee. Think of a bird that stands in your palm. Try to remember the Twenty-first Psalm. Think of a big pink horse galloping south; think of a fly, and close your mouth. If you feel thirsty, then drink from your cup. The birds will keep singing until they wake up.

Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it--

This is no occupation for an adult who can look other adults in the eye, carry his own weight, and count himself one of them.

Furless now, upright, My banished and experimental child You said, though your own heart condemn you I do not condemn you.

Everyone agrees. The dead singers have the best voices. At four o'clock in the morning the dead singers have the best voices.

this final and long longed-for job: to be unhappy without doing evil.

When I was nine, I started reading Homer. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, before I had to go to school, in third or fourth grade, and, for several hours, I would read 'The Iliad' or 'The Odyssey.'

The long silences need to be loved, perhaps more than the words which arrive to describe them in time.

It's hard for me to grasp that I might somehow be my father's equal in any way.

There are people who recall my father as a saint and a monster. I'm quite sure I will share the same fate.

And the night smells like snow. Walking home for a moment you almost believe you could start again. And an intense love rushes to your heart, and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable.

Proof of Your existence? There is nothing but.

Your words are spirit and life. Only say one and he will be healed.

If you love, he wrote, or wish to love, do not dream. from "In Memory of the Future

You gave me in secret one thing to perceive, the tall blue starry strangeness of being here at all.

That insane asshole is dead I drowned him and he's not coming back. Look he has a new life a new name now which no one knows except the one who gave it.

A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying I am Frederico Garcia Lorca risen from the dead–

And I begin to learn.