“Mosquitoes”
Franz Wright
Playing your trumpets
thin as a needle
in my ear,
standing on my finger
or on the back of my neck
like the best arguments
against pity I know.
You insignificant vampires
that sip my life
through a straw;
you drops of blood
with wings;
carriers
of insomnia
I search for
with a lit match . . .
I had a job once
driving around in a truck
to look for your eggs.
They can be found
in ditches, near
train tracks, outside
of a barn
in an upright piano filled with rainwater.
It is impossible to kill
all of you,
invisible in the uncut grass
at the edges of the cemetery:
when the dogs go down there it
looks like they've gotten into birds.
Wright, Franz. “Mosquitoes.” The Longman Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Second Edition. Eds. Stuart Friebert and David Young. New York: Longman, 1989. 618