Wheeling Motel

Excerpt

Wheeling Motel

The vast waters flow past its backyard.
You can purchase a six- pack in bars!
Tammy Wynette’s on the marquee

a block down. It’s twenty- five years ago:
you went to death, I to life, and
which was luckier God only knows.

There’s this line in an unpublished poem of yours.
The river is like that,
a blind familiar.

The wind will die down when I say so;
the leaden and lessening light on
the current.

Then the moon will rise
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.


Day One
Good morning class. Today
we’re going to be discussing
the deplorable adventures
of Franz Wright and his gory flute.
Just kidding. The topic this morning

is an unparaphrasable logic constructed
from parallelisms and images
and held together, on
occasion, by nothing
but the magical non sequitur—

but the hell with that.
We should really examine
your life, the one you bought,
and what happened when you got home
and attempted to assemble it:

that disfiguring explosion
no one witnessed, no one heard,
which you yourself cannot recall,
and by whose unimaginable light you seek
to write the name of beauty.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpted from Wheeling Motel by Franz Wright. Copyright © 2009 by Franz Wright. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.