Kindertotenwald by Franz Wright

Author:Franz Wright [Wright, Franz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-70131-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

this being I was seeking all my life with despair, finding him here and there for a time, so I thought, and pressing on. The being I sought, always failing, always rising and trying again, all my life to become.

So it has always been, and so it always will be—no, not always, not before I was, and for sure not soon. And so I go on working, my peace, sundial of my death. I go on working, for the night is coming when no one may work. When no one has to anymore.

WORK

So I did it. In the end, I always have. Without hesitation, risking all in one throw of the dice I myself fixed to fail. When or where I can’t tell, can’t recall. The study of lost hours, maybe; the movable cell, the workshop abandonable in ten minutes, like the counterfeitor’s or bomb maker’s; maybe the street’s roomless room, empty park, or one of approximately fifty rented rooms, how should I know. Always so much to keep track of, so much that could be done only when I’d failed, when I wasn’t there, you should have seen it. I was nothing but an underlining finger in the texts of light, the vapor trail at dawn, green Venus like a pearl of uranium resting in an unclenched palm. By myself I am not a bad person. But it was always something, a language to unlearn, all that music to unhear. I had nothing to live on, mainly this ecstasy of love, of all that must be done in unrecorded solitude, like prayer or crime, and the fire that no one else can feel or see surrounds me still, setting me apart, I could have done that myself but no. I only have one hand, you know. To do what gave me light, that let me live and was a life of sorts, I forced myself at gunpoint to sign my name in duplicate, page after page without end, agreeing not to have a life, and that was it: in terms of tools or weapons, that hand was all I was given to work with, actually there were two of them. But I think one must have been a reflection, the right one, the dumb one, trembling as I forged my own signature. But never mind all that, you go on ahead, don’t give up our place in this death march of dreamers, this landless nation of the alone who never got to meet. When they stopped for sleep, it was I who kept watch, still do. (Somebody has to, it is said.) I’ll live when I’m dead. And like all past and future leaves, same ones alive, unborn or deceased, the pages said or still unsaid, this one too must soon be done. No I. And it alone remain.

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