Frank Bidart

"At the grave's lip, what is
but is not what
returns you to what is not"
(from "Like")

"Dream of the Book" (entire poem):
That great hopefulness that lies in
imagining that you are an unreadable, not
blank slate, but something even you cannot
read because words will rise from its
depths only when you at last
manage to expose it to air, -
the pathology of the provinces. You need
air.
Then you find air. Somehow somewhere
as if whatever feels expectation were
wounded, gutted by the bewildering self-
buried thousand impersonations
by which you know you
made and remade
yourself, -
one day, staring at the mountain,
you ceased to ask
Open Sesame
merely requiring that narrative reveal
something structural about the world.
Reading history
you learn that those who cannot read
history are condemned to repeat it
etcetera
just like those who
can, or think they can.
Substitute the psyche for history substitute myth for
the psyche economics
for myth substitute politics, culture, history etc.
As if there were a book
As if there were a book inside which you can
breathe.
Where, at every turn, you see at last the lineaments
Where the end of the earth's long dream of
virtue is not, as you have
again and again found it here, the will
gazing out at the dilemmas
proceeding from its own nature
unbroken but in stasis.
Seduced not by a book but by the idea
of a book
like the Summa in five fat volumes, that your priest
in high school explained Thomas Aquinas
almost finished, except that there were,
maddeningly, "just a few things he didn't
Chave time, before dying, quite
to figure out"
That history is a series of failed revelations
you're sure you hear folded, hidden
within the all-but-explicit
bitter
taste-like-dirt inside Dinah Washington's
voice singing This bitter earth
A few months before Thomas'
death, as he talked with Jesus
Jesus asked him
what reward he wanted for his
virtue-
to which Thomas replied, You, Lord,
only You -
which is why, as if this vision
unfit him for his life, he told the priest
prodding him to take up once again
writing his book, Reginald, I cannot:
everything I have written I now see is straw.
Though the book whose text articulates
the text of
creation
is an arrogance, you think, flung by priests
at all that is
fecund, that has not yet found being
Though priests, addicted to
unanswearable but necessary questions,
also everywhere are addicted to cruel answers
you wake happy
when you dream
you have seen the book, the Book exists
You sail protested, contested
seas, the something within you that
chooses your masters
itself not chosen. Inheritor inheriting
inheritors, you must earn what you inherit.

"Robert Viscusi, the bullet you aimed at Leaves of Grass bounced
off its spine and landed, hot, intact, where I now still sit"
(From "Whitman")

"You mourn not
what is not, but what never could have been"
(From "As you Crave Soul")

"Out of immense appetite we make
immense promises
the future dimensions of which
we cannot see
then see
when it seems death to keep them"
(From "Plea and Chastisement")

"As starless blackness
approaches, the soul reverses itself, in
the eerie acceptance of finitude."
(From "Against Rage")