Frank Bidart Poems

What I hope (when I hope) is that we'll
see each other again,--

. . . and again reach the VEIN
...

The only thing I miss about Los Angeles

is the Hollywood Freeway at midnight, windows down and
radio blaring
...

(Dante, Vita Nuova)


To all those driven berserk or humanized by love
...

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
...

He's still young--; thirty, but looks younger--
or does he?... In the eyes and cheeks, tonight,
turning in the mirror, he saw his mother,--
puffy; angry; bewildered... Many nights,
...

In a dark night, when the light
burning was the burning of love (fortuitous
night, fated, free,--)
as I stole from my dark house, dark
...

. . .telling those who swarm around him his desire
is that an appendage from each of them
fill, invade each of his orifices,--
...

Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand
technologies of ecstasy

boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water
...

What none knows is when, not if.
Now that your life nears its end
when you turn back what you see
is ruin. You think, It is a prison. No,
...

the remnant of a vast, oceanic
bruise (wound delivered early and long ago)

was in you purity and
...