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.
Frank BidartWe fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them change them and are changed.
Frank BidartThe Old Man at the Wheel
Measured against the immeasurable
universe, no word you have spoken
brought light. Brought
light to what, as a child, you thought
too dark to be survived. By exorcism
you survived. By submission, then making.
You let all the parts of that thing you would
cut out of you enter your poem because
enacting there all its parts allowed you
the illusion you could cut it from your soul.
Dilemmas of choice given what cannot
change 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 November
means driving directly into the sun.
up or down from the infinite C E N T E R
B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time
the voice in my head said
LOVE IS THE DISTANCE
BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE
Understand that when the beast within you
succeeds again in paralyzing into unending
incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to
try to make
its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its
rectitude. It knows that it alone
knows you.
Tags: self-knowledge self-defeat
The stratagems by which briefly you
ameliorated, even seemingly
untwisted what still twists within you —
you loved their taste and lay there
on your side
nursing like a puppy.
Tags: art comfort consolation
Though the body is its
genesis, a poem is the vision of a process
Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space
Carved in space, vision your poor eye's single
armor against winter spring summer fall
Song
You know that it is there, lair
where the bear ceases
for a time even to exist.
Crawl in. You have at last killed
enough and eaten enough to be fat
enough to cease for a time to exist.
Crawl in. It takes talent to live at night, and scorning
others you had that talent, but now you sniff
the season when you must cease to exist.
Crawl in. Whatever for good or ill
grows within you needs
you for a time to cease to exist.
It is not raining inside
tonight. You know that it is there. Crawl in.
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.
Tags: advice
drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal
round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,
within I am awake
repairing in dirt the frayed immaculate thread
forced by being to watch the birth of suns
Tags: art consolation mundane-life
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