Franz Wright's "On Earth"

Thoughts on our not-hereness.

On Earth

Resurrection of the little apple tree outside
my window, leaf-
light of late
in the April
called her eyes, forget
forget—
but how
How does one go
about dying?
Who on earth
is going to teach me—
The world
is filled with people
who have never died


from Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Knopf, 2003)

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I have had this poem on my mind for a long time. I believe I mentioned it in a previous newsletter, not too long ago, and probably in a newsletter before that. And probably before that, too. The final seven lines of this poem are some of the most remarkable lines of poetry I’ve ever read. Here they are again:

How does one go
about dying?
Who on earth
is going to teach me—
The world
is filled with people
who have never died

I want to think about these lines — and so much else — later. First, I want to remind myself of the lines that come before (seven lines, as well!):

Resurrection of the little apple tree outside
my window, leaf-
light of late
in the April
called her eyes, forget
forget—
but how

I love these lines, too. They are like echoes and fragments, bits of images taped together and pasted against a moving wall. They flit and flicker. They dance a little bit, too — from an image (“leaf- / light”) to a time (“April”) to a small snippet of a moment (“called her eyes”) to a memory un-conjured (“forget / forget”).

I don’t know what these lines do, but I do know that they offer me something — a feeling, maybe. A sense of things. Reading them and sitting with them, I feel as if I am inside a mind trying to recall a moment lived and then lost. I feel that mind sifting through squares of light, literal windows, trying to hold onto what is already gone. Or, too — what is going away. For some reason, thinking of all of this, I thought of Terrence Malick’s movie A Hidden Life:

This association probably, as you can see from the movie stills above, has something to do with light. Most realizations, perhaps, do. I know mine do. I know that whenever I find myself wondering about something, whenever I find myself struck by nearly anything — it almost certainly is the result of gazing out a window on a moving train to Boston, watching the light dance along the tip-tops of waves cresting against the Rhode Island shore, or walking to the train in the late afternoon, seeing the geometric boldness the shadows make out of bricks, or the fire the light makes out of the fruit packaged to sell in boxes on the corner.

And I love that today’s poem begins with light, with littleness, with resurrection. It is not to be forgotten, given how the poem ends with death. And what I love, too, about this poem, is that it echoes. It echoes into itself before it offers the realization and weight that the final seven lines offer.

Here is that echoing:

forget
forget—
but how
How

It is this dual repetition that leads into the wonder and sorrow-filled heaviness of the poem’s final lines. And it is this repetition that makes the poem sound as if it is echoing, or even chanting. There is a spiritual quality here, a dreamy descent into the self. It is as if the speaker, searching for that window of light, grasping for a memory they cannot find, finally realizes that this — all of this — will be lost, and then asks: How does one go about dying?

That echoing feels true to Wright’s work. Wright became a Catholic at the age of 47, after nearly a lifetime spent dealing with his own manic depression and addiction. In an interview with Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler, he spoke about this conversion:

When I became a Catholic, I had been sick for a very long time, two and a half years. I thought I had lost my mind and that writing was over for me completely. I was suicidal.

Then something happened. I met the young woman I would marry, and I stopped drinking. I started to get better. I moved to Waltham, where we live now. One day, as I did most days, I found a Catholic church and sat in the back for mass. On this morning, it just came over me. I thought, “Why not become one of those people I admire so much?” People who believe something is possible, who refuse not to believe it. Christianity is my tradition. It could be Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism—I believe these are all different languages for the same experience—but the Catholic tradition is where I feel happy and at home. It seems to me the summation of all of the attempts to live this life of belief in the impossible.

And so I hear in this repetition from today’s poem a kind of bell tolling. I hear a grounded-ness, an attempt at prayer — that relentless, musical belief in the impossible.

When asked about today’s poem in that same interview I just mentioned, Wright said the following:

…to ponder one’s absolute not-hereness can have the effect of making being here doubly intense. This is something that’s very big in Zen Buddhism. There’s a monk who says, “Do you see this glass that I am drinking out of? In my eyes, it’s already broken, but that doesn’t depress me. It means I can enjoy it all the more while it exists.” He’s talking about his own body, of course. We’re already dead. Everything we’ve ever perceived or said or thought, everything that’s ever happened to us, what’s happening at this very moment, will be completely erased as if it never occurred for all we know. We have to deal with this possibility. For me, this is a source of energy. It makes consciousness ten times more intense and more vivid. It doesn’t frighten me. It makes everything light up.

I love this. I love it especially when paired with these lines from an earlier poem of Wright’s, titled “The Face”:

Is there a single thing in nature
that can approach in mystery
the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then
its transformation between childhood and old age—

We are surrounded at every instant
by sights that ought to strike the sane
unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute
with gratitude and awe.

Wright’s speaker in today’s poem is, I think, grappling with the mystery that Wright himself says “makes everything light up,” grappling, too, with the “sights” that the speaker of his other poem above says "ought to strike the sane / unbenumbed person tongue-tied.” And I think that’s why Wright’s lines today are so wildly powerful. They capture what it feels like to be in the face of that mystery without finding any sense of gratitude for it yet. To simply be aware of it. To say how once. And then to say how again. To be a little scared. To not know. Maybe, actually, to be more than a little scared.

For a long time, I was so fixated on that utter binary that death makes out of life. One minute you’re here, and the next — gone. That gone-ness, that not-hereness — it terrified me for so long because I could not imagine it. I still cannot. I don’t know if any of us can. I could not imagine not being here — alive, in this world with you — because all of my life I have been here. I would close my eyes and try, but I’d only find myself startling my eyes back open out of the fear of losing myself in the trying.

It took — strangely, perhaps — the act of losing people I loved for me to stop trying to wrestle sense out of this binary, and to instead accept it. In an essay I wrote years ago, I described the loss of the mother of one of my best friends. She had opened her arms and her house to me for years, at a time, especially, when I was figuring out my own conception of family. She became for me a second mom. Her death was at the end of a long struggle with cancer, a struggle that altered and renewed itself over time. It was not a singular event, is what I am trying to say. Her death was part of her life. It was, like her life, something she endured with grace, and with frustration, and also at times with gratitude.

Watching her move through it, I was filled with pain and also with my own sense of gratitude. I didn’t think I deserved to watch someone move through something so important; I didn’t think I deserved to witness such a near-constant display of grace. But I have come to realize that such thoughts of deserving or not deserving seem to me beside the point. I did deserve such witness; I think we all do. It is part of life to witness the grace others make out of life. And, too, of death. We treat death so often like a moment that occurs abruptly at the end of a life; we don’t often see it as part of our lives. That it too, like life, can remind us of sorrow, or joy, or light itself.

I felt so much at the moment and in the aftermath of my friend’s mother’s death. I felt fragile and scared. I felt awestruck, mystified, and slightly terrified by the smallness of her body at the end. I remember thinking to myself that her body was so small it could fit inside a pillowcase. And yet I felt, too, so much in love. I felt in love with her and with my friend and with my friend’s father and with all of the collective friends who gathered together that day, who gathered together days later to utter a long and powerful om at her funeral. What strikes me now is that I still feel all of those things. Fragile, scared, awestruck, mystified, terrified, and in love. I feel all of those things everyday. Death perhaps crystalized such feelings. But they are part of life.

In his long poem, “East Boston, 1996,” Wright has this moment that I adore. Here it is:

There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home, for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable.

There is so much here that swells up and fills the heart, that reminds me of the strange and ever-present beauty of this life. It’s there in all the juxtaposition, all that makes no sense. How life is unendurable and yet we still endure. How in the small bolted rooms there are still those ready to welcome you. How the welcome comes after the dying, like a little line break of grace. How there is love and hope even amidst and among it all. Wright captures it all in these few short lines. That deep breath you take when you are struggling, and how, in filling your lungs up, there is that small and still powerful reminder that something is possible, some light, some love, some hope.

And so, when I turn again to the final lines of today’s poem, I hold the fear and fragility at the heart of them. I hold the unanswerable, and I hold still all the ways that we are taught about the possibility of this impossible question. I know that there is no real answer, in the same way that there is no absolutely universal form of healing for each of our own particular struggles; in the same way that on the other side of addiction, I imagine, is a sobriety that is full of light at the same time as it is full of daily work and choice and loneliness and pain; in the same way that even the beauty of a lifetime of love is made up of so many ordinary moments, choices made and unmade, kisses in the kitchen and tasks forgotten and reminders to yourself that yes, you should say it, you should say I love you, you should say it before you leave for work and when you get home and anytime in between; in the same way that knowing that death is part of life does not make it any easier to deal with the void of losing someone, the knowledge that not just a body is gone, but a voice on the other end of a phone, hands that once cooked a meal; in the same way that this, all of this, this loving and losing and lonely and shared thing is what we call a life and what we live each day.

And so I think, too, of the question’s inverse, which holds true for me, as well: How does one go about living? Who on earth is going to teach me? The world is filled with people living for just the first and only time. I don’t have an answer, though I know the answer is tied up in all of the possibilities that we each make out of our lives. We make and remake these possibilities each and every day.

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Some Notes:

1. The ad hoc coalition Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here. On their website, they have also linked various solidarity projects, including an open letter from writers that I have signed.

2. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.