Wheeling Motel Poems

From the indomitable Franz Wright, a luminous book of reconciliation with the past and acceptance of what may come in the future.
From his earliest years, he writes in Will, he had the gift of impermanence / so I would be ready, / accompanied / by a rage to prove them wrong . . . that I too was worthy of love. This rage comes coupled with the poet’s own brand of love, what he calls one / strange alone / heart’s wish / to help all / hearts. Poetry is indeed Wright’s help, and he delivers it to us with a wry sense of the daily in America: in his wonderfully local relationship to God (whom he encounters along with a catfish in the emerald shallows of Walden Pond); in the little West Virginia motel of the title poem, on the banks of the Ohio River, where Tammy Wynette’s on the marquee and he is visited by the figure of Walt Whitman, examining the tear on a dead face.
In Wheeling Motel, Wright’s poetry continues to surprise us with its frank appraisal of our soul, with his combustible loneliness and unstoppable joy.
At 54
An instant of lucidity, an hour
outside of time,
a life–
I glance at the left hand
unclenched in the sunlight
shining on my desk
and think of my friend’s
recent cremation–
that takes a while. And I can’t wait
to return to this chair
in which I am sitting, this
world, the one where
each object stands
for nothing at all but
its own inexplicable existence.