New Arrivals

(Franz's Wright's God's Silence came this week.)

The Visiting

by Franz Wright

I suffer from insomnia, from loneliness I sleep;
in the midst of the talk and the laughter
all at once you are there--

Hour of waking up and writhing
with humiliation, or
of wishes answered before

one was aware of what they were.
And let me ask you this: the dead,
where aren't they?

Hour when the ones who can't rest
go to bed, and the ones
who can't wake go to work--

Dark blue morning glory
I reach to touch, there is another world
and it is this world.

Then the light streamed in yellow
and blue through long windows, and blood
turned to wine in my veins.

Tears of wine
rode down my cheek.
It's happening, I thought,

though it had never happened
before. I squeezed
my eyes closed, gazing into

a darkness all of light. The more
you tried to hold it back, the more
sweetly and irresistibly it arrived.

***

(Published in God's Silence, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)