Beginning Again

This poem comes out to me as being seemingly dark. Maybe it is just my image of "...Alone again performing brain surgery on himself in a badly lit room with no mirror." It almost seems like a dream. Or like a Tim Burton film (or just Alice in Wonderland). And within this darkness, at the end I ironically find myself feeling refreshed from all of the burdens of the first stanza. I think the structure of this poem is the bread and butter of it. The first stanza goes on about being lost and confused in a giant mess--just as the stanza diction itself seems. And then it continues down and gets more and more simple and easier to understand, and then you finally hit that "Why?" and you cross into this new phase of the poem of optimism and light. And with the last stanza, I can just imagine myself in complete tranquility, and with only two things--myself and Li Po. Franz Wright is very sneaky about how he does this, even if the reader has no clue what the poem is about, by the time they get through the end, there is just a sigh of relief and he or she has completely forgotten about the mess in the first stanza. After reading this poem and analyzing it 3 or 4 times, this is one of my favorite poems in the mix, simply because it makes the reader feel the writing instead of interpreting it.