forgotten in your pocket...

Two from Frank Bidart:


Catullus: Odi et amo

I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even
wants the fly while writhing.


              – from The Sacrifice.


~



Little Fugue


at birth you were handed a ticket

beneath every journey the ticket to this
journey in one direction

or say the body

is a conveyor belt, moving in one direction
slower or swifter than sight

at birth

you were handed a ticket, indecipherable
rectangle forgotten in your pocket

or say you stand upon a moving walkway

as if all you fear
is losing your

balance moving in one direction

beneath every journey the ticket to this
journey in one direction


              – from Music Like Dirt (the first chapbook to have been
               a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and Star Dust

*

No other writer, for me, addresses humanity’s darkness like Frank Bidart. It’s an interior voice that is frightening in its reality. A hard-edged beauty. That voice – or I should say voices – is an original. There is no other poetry like Bidart’s. It doesn’t waver, excuse itself, or settle … but forever drags along with it.