Recurring Awakening by Franz Wright

Recurring Awakening

I stop a tall girl all in blue on the hall

and receive first a harried and desultory apology

then, point blank, news that you passed late last night.

You passed at three-thirty in the morning.

What is it, some sort of exam?

She smiles at herself,

epicenter of this

revelation, I find myself walking along

a high ridge in the wake of an ice storm

at the heart of some annihilated fairy tale

of forest in West Virginia,

a redwing blackbird’s

feet clenched to one crystal branch

per deceased tree: eyes stitched shut

and beak wide open.

And finally, there it is: your face, floating

at my feet with nose pressed to transparent black ice;

yes, you are certainly dead, all the signs point to it.

Wrapped in white cerements,

white face more youthful

and grave than I have ever seen it, frowning slightly

as though it were reading, one eye blind

in a blond swath of hair,

vague smile like the velvet depression

the lost diamond has left in its case;

now strangely you are moving

in a wide circle around me, stepping

sideways in time

to some slow stately dance

hand in hand

with the handless

in their identical absence

of affect, lips moving in unison.

I can’t hear a thing, but it’s said

the instant of being aware we are sleeping

and the instant of waking are one

and the same—and thus, against delusion

we possess this defense.

Only if you refuse

to respond, if I can only write you,

and write on black wind-blurred water, what’s the use?