FRANZ WRIGHT'S new collection, The Beforelife, is forthcoming from Knopf in January 2001. He is author of 1998's Ill Lit: Selected & New Poems (Oberlin College Press), and a recipient of Guggenheim, Whiting and National Endowment for the Arts awards and fellowships. He lives outside Boston, Massachusetts. OCTAVES We were, about as useful as a hammer and nail made of                                             gold Some woman crying the first thing we heard before our                                             birth No people anymore Oh prayer of night Who's going to miss you 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 STUDY IN ACID & GREEN On Broadway blonde high-heeled skinny kindersluts smoking and giggling in terror The dark side of the knife And the way certain places on earth amount to forgetting the future,                             and heaven's prefiguration - Then the I died (for laughter and beauty) DIARY OTHERWISE EMPTY                           for D.D.L. Caught a brown trout in a trickle of creek; looks like rain. When he is no longer needed Christ will come again. AESTHETIC The instant before the slash bleeds - for example her hair getting long like the night in late fall. Kayaking alone on Lake Kakapoopee. Crown of barbed wire, no one is born sad. SAYING Sunlight of the spirit - Courage is not the absence of fear Word of the four billion letters whose spelling determined the color of my eyes and my ultimate fate, so they say Rumi says, out beyond ideas of doing good and doing evil there is a field I'll meet you there I want one good look at Rodin's "The Shitter" It is my intention God damn it to ride on the heights of the earth, I have visited every last nook and cranny of the depths You may find a dead bird you won't see a flock of them anywhere