James Wright: A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard’s Shack

Near the dry river’s water-mark we found
Your brother Minnegan,
Flopped like a fish against the muddy ground.
Beany, the kid whose yellow hair turns green,
Told me to find you, even in the rain,
And tell you he was drowned.

I hid behind the chassis on the bank,
The wreck of someone’s Ford:
I was afraid to come and wake you drunk:
You told me once the waking up was hard,
The daylight beating at you like a board.
Blood in my stomach sank.

Beside, you told him never to go out
Along the river-side
Drinking and singing, clattering about.
You might have thrown a rock at me and cried
I was to blame, I let him fall in the road
And pitch down on his side.

Well, I’ll get hell enough when I get home
For coming up this far,
Leaving the note, and running as I came.
I’ll go and tell my father where you are.
You’d better go find Minnegan before
Policemen hear and come.

Beany went home, and I got sick and ran,
You old son of a bitch.
You better hurry down to Minnegan;
He’s drunk or dying now, I don’t know which,
Rolled in the roots and garbage like a fish,
The poor old man.


Copyright © 1992 by James Wright. From Above the River: The Complete Poems (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux). Included in Vox Populi for educational noncommercial purposes only.

Poetry collections by James Wright (1927-80) include The Green Wall (1957), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award, Saint Judas (1959), The Branch Will Not Break (1963), Shall We Gather at the River (1968), and Two Citizens (1973). Wright was elected a fellow of The Academy of American Poets in 1971, and the following year his Collected Poems received the Pulitzer Prize. He died in New York City in 1980, having served on the English faculties at the University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and Hunter College (CUNY).