"Beginning Again"

Beginning Again


“If I could stop talking, completely
cease talking for a year, I might begin
to get well,” he muttered.
Off alone again performing
brain surgery on himself
in a small badly lit
room with no mirror. A room
whose floor ceiling and walls
are all mirrors, what a mess
oh my God -

And still
it stands,
the question
not how begin
again, but rather

Why?

So we sit there
together
the mountain
and me, Li Po
said, until only the mountain
remains.

                  - Franz Wright


The reason I chose this poem was because of how difficult it is too understand. The words are simple and understandable but the meaning behind them is anything. What I mean by anything is that any reader could bend the words to fit to themselves or something they understand.

The first stanza is the most bizarre. The words give me a strange image of a man doing surgery upon himself in a room full of mirrors.This is not meant to be taken literally of course. From the first sentance the reader knows that the man talking is not well, " . . . I might begin to get well . . . " When I am sick or find myself under a heap of pressure or going through a tough time I feel as if I should open up my head and pull everything negative out of it. Fix or remove what is making me feel that way so then I can live my life to it's fullest, worries aside. The mirros illudes to being able to see all the feelings you don't want to have or see what you don't want to be, which would be a mess. Mirrors can be awful. If a person looks into one and does not like what he/she see's, it can be tragic.

"If I could stop talking, completely cease talking for a year, I might begin to get well . . ." This, I took literally. If I could stop talking for a long period of time and listen to my own thoughts I feel I would reach a sense of enlightenment, possibly? Something of the like.

Once Wright made me feel like taking all of the mistakes and follies out of my mind he asks me, "Why?"
Instead of asking myseld how I can do all this, ask myself why. Would someone want to go back and change some of the choices they made, take back words not meant to be spoken, undo regreted acts, change their life and hope for a better one? Or maybe keep living with the mistakes made and instead begin to better their life now. Change the present and the future instead of the past.

Backround Information on the last stanza:
Within the last stanza Wright refers to Li Po who is a Chinese poet who, in his teenage years, retired to the mountain with a religous man by the name of Tunyen-tzu.(www.humanistictexts.org/LiPo.htm)

"So we sit there together the mountain and me, Li Po said, until only the mountain remains." In the end we will all pass on and only mountains and nature will remain. In the end we will never know what would have been if changing the past was possible but hopefully know, if we got the chance to change our past, if we would or not.

I enjoyed the poem a lot because it made me think of my own life and the choices and have made and if I would change my past. I would have to say I would.