Another cheerful missive from Franz Wright

 

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by Franz Wright

 

If I think I have problems

I look in the mirror;

I go to the window, or

ponder the future reduced

to more or less

three pounds of haunted meat.

And it’s never

like I always said:

if you don’t want something

wish for it . . .

Lost in the beautiful world

I can no longer perceive

but only, now and then,

imagine

or recall–

First the long sinister youth

and then the dying man

who talks to old friends

teachers, doctors

but they don’t understand

the way we feel.

 

 

I left this poem in the entry to a diner in northern Michigan, where a sign on the door asks patrons not to vape while others eat, and where I watched an old man among other old men steal the waitress’s tip to pay his share of a breakfast bill. She shook her head, resigned. She’d seen it before.

 

So when I think I’ve got problems, to steal Franz Wright’s opening lines . . .

 

That’s a hilarious opener, by the way—

If I think I have problems

I look in the mirror

 

The duality in those lines, the person and his image, is echoed in the speaker’s “we” at the end

and then the dying man

who talks to old friends

teachers, doctors

but they don’t understand

the way we feel.

 

As long as I’m pulling quotes, re-read this great description of what it feels like to be depressed.

 

Lost in the beautiful world

I can no longer perceive

but only, now and then,

imagine

or recall–

 

Now, someone please tell me what “three pounds of haunted meat” means.

 

I’ll re-post a biography of Wright from an earlier post:

 

Franz Wright’s face is his biography. This is what a hard life looks like. But it’s a heroic face too, considering the suffering he lived with: beatings by his father, worse beatings by his stepfather, parental abandonment, manic-depression, alcoholism, and drug abuse. Like writer Mary Karr, his onetime colleague and friend, he overcame addiction and converted to Catholicism, finding some measure of stability in the last sixteen years of his life.

 

Franz Wright (1953-2015) was born in Austria where his father, the famous poet James Wright, was studying on a Fulbright scholarship. The older Wright left the family when Franz was eight, and only stayed in sporadic contact with the family. When Franz was fifteen he sent his father a poem, and his father wrote back, “Well I’ll be damned. You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.”

 

The younger Wright graduated from Oberlin College in 1977. In 1984 he was winning awards and teaching at Emerson College when he was fired for “drinking related activities.” He sunk into a years-long depression, wasn’t able to write, and attempted suicide.

 

In 1999 he married a former student, Elizabeth Oehklers. He converted to Catholicism, got sober and was able to write again.

 

He died earlier this year of lung cancer at age 62.