by Franz Wright

Bodies are endless, but sentience
gazing from endlessly various eyes
is one, and I can prove it.

Music’s an idealized and
disembodied nervous system.
Who’s the sacrificial famous person now?

The angel of death is the angel of birth.
Look, look, the monster
has tears in his eyes.

A pair of dark glasses
smoking a cigarette;
a pair of dark glasses, initially

and solely manufactured
for ancient Chinese
judges . . .

When you die the world
is going to die, the world
and all the stars —

what dies when you are born?

When you have to take it to feel, more or less,
the way you once felt
when you weren’t taking it,

I’ll meet you at high moon.

I’ll greet you,
like the other
last speaker of a language.

At the trial of sleep,

theoretically,
I’ll be seeing you.
In the aisles of the pharmacy

open all night I’ll be waiting.

At the front door of the insane
asylum dollhouse of your childhood
I’ll be waiting, I will meet you

at the marriage of never happen
and forever, I will be you;
at the velvet heartshaped dark

green morning glory leaves, my
dragonfly, sister, sexlessly wed
to me by unbreakable vow,

by corpselike refusal to speak.

by Franz Wright

I wear this small fish hook
of crucifix
Look

how it helps
keep the head weighted
down

down with shame, with
the glory
and shame

Right here
it hangs,
near

the heart’s
hidden room
where

a table stands
set for me
not

a dark bar
(no more
that pointless horror)

Table
for two: one
invisible host

and the guest
who is anyone
hungering

thirsting and
hungering
and meeting himself

for the first time,
the maggot
waiting

in the mirror
there at
the bottom

of the
drained
chalice —

by Franz Wright

Most I loved
the secret
sense of being a we;

of living in two
places at once (or
everywhere).

How I learned to bear
euphoria
in time.

Which made me patient,
kind and sad.  And so
I took a look around

in glory, I stood
gazing down at the world.
And I saw how it was —

I saw my own
irreparable role there.
It was then, right then

I should have prepared:
I should have set out;
put on the mirrored armor and returned.

by Elly Bookman

There is a morning, and there are
brown eyes rising somewhere
against a dense piano bass line
meant to begin things.  This river

has come to fill in the dug – out canals
with whitecaps cropping up so far between
that I learn the catch of that dawn

and fear floating off: there is the return
as my now still, different self

to the city I left still growing.  Now

standing just before it all comes into day,
when the light lands like a bruise

at my feet and aches in the air
around me, there is barely breath left
to convince against the improbable

second love: I believe it unique,
capable of encouraging a big eddy
around my whole inside song.  And there
is the gleaming, auroral blindness.