from the collection Ax in Blossom: Final Poems and Fragments
So, I thought,
as soon as the door was opened
And the landlord disappeared (no,
he really disappeared)
and i have to check
Room invisible.
there it stood
In its gray corner-
narrow bed sheets
The color of old aspirin.
maybe all this had happened
somewhere inside me
already,
Or was just about to happen.
Is there any difference in this also?
Familiar,
familiar but not
Still remember. . .
Small narrow bed.
I often wonder
where will i find it,
it finds me, or
What will this look like?
What not?
it was terrible
I couldn’t speak. Then
Maybe you should lie down for a minute, I heard myself
Thinking. I mean
If you are having so much trouble
Work. and when
was the last time
with real sadness
and desire to change
You got down on your knees?
I could get some work done
Here, I shrugged;
I had done it before too.
I will work non-stop.
oh i’ll stay awake
if only out of fear
at the thought of waking up
Up here. Mother,
a voice spoke from the darkness
in the back seat
where a tall thin man was lying
his arms crossed
on his chest,
while they were slowly moving up and down
Pressure is being applied to get the numbers out
At the bright doors,
of the midnight doctor;
in his hurt heart
he was already dissolving
with a black mississippi
of mercy, sweat flowing from it
as if it had been extinguished
with a bucket of ice water
As soon as he was sleeping. “I saw the light,”
They kept shouting. “to do
‘I saw the light’!”
Mother- There is no light there.
I can’t see any light.
__________________________________
derive from ax in flower By Franz Wright. In July 2026, Alfred A. Published by Knopf, The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Elizabeth Ohlkers Wright.
franz wright
Franz Wright was born in 1953 in Vienna, Austria, and grew up in the Northwest, Midwest, and Northern California. His works include The Beforelife (2001), Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (2003), God’s Silence (2006), Early Poems (2007), Wheeling Motel (2009), Kindertotenwald (2011), and F (2013). He was the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship, the PEN/Voelker Award for Poetry, and a Pulitzer Prize for Walking on Martha’s Vineyard. Wright, who was the son of poet James Wright, died in 2015.
