incurring the mirth of all.
The one he hanged himself with.
He turns his head.
The house is gone. He is relieved to note
the little Olivetti
like a miniature suitcase
placed beside him on the frozen ground.
A hangover isn't so bad—
one feels extremely courageous and lucid,
apparently.
And you need no one.
He thumbed a ride at this point, clearly.
It had been written down
for years,
it had already happened.
It suddenly occurs to him
that the element of grammar they call
tense, like time itself, has always been
falsely assumed to reflect some demonstrable
facet of reality—that word.
As if there were just one.
Then there's the problem of your watch,
weight, age, and height
in eternity.
Let Augustine worry about it.
The glorious future awaited him,
or awaits him, the future
perfect, too. His life—
it had begun at last, and high time. It has been over so long.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank James Randall and Gerald Costanzo, the editors of Pym-Randall Press and Carnegie Mellon University Press, who first published in book form the poems contained in this collection. He also wishes to thank David Young of Oberlin College Press for publishing III Lit: Selected & New Poems, in which many of these poems have remained in print through the years.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Franz Wright's most recent works include God's Silence, Walking to Martha's Vineyard (which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry), The Beforelife (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), and III Lit: Selected & New Poems. He has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship, and the PEN / Voelcker Prize for Poetry, among other honors. He currently lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, with his wife, the translator and writer Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.
This book was set in Adobe Garamond. Designed for the Adobe Corporation by Robert Slimbach, the fonts are based on types first cut by Claude Garamond (c. 1480—1561). Garamond was a pupil of Geoffroy Tory and is believed to have followed the Venetian models, although he introduced a number of important differences, and it is to him that we owe the letter we now know as “old style.” He gave to his letters a certain elegance and feeling of movement that won their creator an immediate reputation and the patronage of Francis I of France.
Composed by Stratford Publishing Services
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Printed and bound by R. R. Donnelley & Sons
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Designed by Virginia Tan
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2007 by Franz Wright
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The poems in this collection originally appeared in the following:
The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes (Pym-Randall
Press, 1982); Entry in an Unknown Hand (Carnegie Mellon
University Press, 1989); The Night World & The Word Night
(Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1993); and Rorschach Test
(Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1995).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wright, Franz, [date]
Earlier poems / Franz Wright—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49497-9
I. Title.
PS3573.R5327E15 2007
811'.54 dc22 2006048796
v3.0