Asking for My Younger Brother by Franz Wright

Asking for My Younger Brother

I never did find you.

I later heard how you'd wandered the streets

for weeks, washing dishes before you got fired;

taking occasional meals at the Salvation Army

with the other diagnosed. How on one particular night

you won four hundred dollars at cards:

how some men followed you and beat you up,

leaving you unconscious in an alley

where you were wakened by police

and arrested for vagrancy, for being tired

of getting beaten up at home.

I'd dreamed you were dead,

and started to cry.

I couldn't exactly phone Dad.

I bought a pint of bourbon

and asked for you all afternoon in a blizzard.

In Hell

Dante had words with the dead,

although

they had no bodies

and he could not touch them, nor they him.

A man behind the ticket counter

in the Greyhound terminal.

pointed to one of the empty seats, where

someone who looked like me sometimes sat down

among the people waiting to depart.

I don't know why I write this.

With it comes the irrepressible desire

to write nothing, to remember nothing;

there is even the desire

to walk out in some field and bury it

along with all my other so-called

poems, which help no one—

where each word will blur

into earth finally,

where the mind that voiced them

and the hand that took them down will.

So what. I left

the bus fare back

to Sacramento with this man,

and asked him

to give it to you.