Frank Bidart

“What takes place in me stays there.”

“The law is that youmust livein the house you have built.The law is absurd: it iswritten down nowhere.You are uncertain what crimeis, though each life writhing toelude what it has madefeels like punishment.”

“drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnalround, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,within       I am awakerepairing in dirt the frayed immaculate threadforced by being to watch the birth of suns”

“Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance.            *I abjure advice-giver.”

“SongYou know that it is there, lairwhere the bear ceasesfor a time even to exist.Crawl in. You have at last killedenough and eaten enough to be fatenough to cease for a time to exist.Crawl in. It takes talent to live at night, and scorningothers you had that talent, but now you sniffthe season when you must cease to exist.Crawl in. Whatever for good or illgrows within you needsyou for a time to cease to exist.It is not raining insidetonight. You know that it is there. Crawl in.”

“Understand that when the beast within yousucceeds again in paralyzing into unendingincompletion whatever you again had the temerity totry to makeits triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of itsrectitude. It knows that it aloneknows you.”

“Though the body is itsgenesis, a poem is the vision of a processOut of ceaseless motion in edgeless spaceCarved in space, vision your poor eye's singlearmor against winter spring summer fall”

“The stratagems by which briefly youameliorated, even seeminglyuntwisted what still twists within you —you loved their taste and lay thereon your sidenursing like a puppy.”

“The Old Man at the WheelMeasured against the immeasurable universe, no word you have spokenbrought light. Broughtlight to what, as a child, you thoughttoo dark to be survived. By exorcismyou survived. By submission, then making.You let all the parts of that thing you wouldcut out of you enter your poem becauseenacting there all its parts allowed youthe illusion you could cut it from your soul.Dilemmas of choice given what cannotchange alone roused you to words.As you grip the things that were young when you were young, they crumble in your hand.Now you must drive west, which in Novembermeans driving directly into the sun.”

“We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them change them and are changed.”

“up or down from the infinite C E N T E RB R I M M I N G at the winking rim of timethe voice in my head saidLOVE IS THE DISTANCEBETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE”

“But being is making; not only large things, a family, a book, a business; but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between friends, a meal.”

“then the voice in my head said WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS REVOLT AGAINST IT WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE ”