Frank Bidart

The planet turns there without you, beautiful. Exiled by death you cannot touch it. Weird joy to watch postulates lived out and discarded, something crowded inside us always craving to become something glistening outside us, the relentless planet showing itself the logic of what is buried inside it. To love existence is to love what is indifferent to you you think, as you watch it turn there, beautiful. World that can know itself only by world, soon it must colonize and infect the stars. You are an hypothesis made of flesh. What you will teach the stars is constant rage at the constant prospect of not-being. • Sometimes when I wake it's because I hear a knock.Knock, Knock. Two knocks, quite clear. I wake and listen. It's nothing.

When the eye When the edgeless screen receiving light from the edgeless universe When the eye first When the edgeless screen facing outward as if hypnotized by the edgeless universe When the eye first saw that it Hungry for more light resistlessly began to fold back upon itself      TWIST As if a dog sniffing Ignorant of origins familiar with hunger As if a dog sniffing a dead dog Before nervous like itself but now weird inert cold nerveless Twisting in panic had abruptly sniffed itself When the eye first saw that it must die      When the eye first Brooding on our origins you ask When and I say Then • wound-dresser      let us call the creature driven again and again to dress with fresh bandages and a pail of disinfectant suppurations that cannot heal for the wound that confers existence is mortal wound-dresser what wound is dressed the wound of being • Understand that it can drink till it is sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. It alone knows you. It does not wish you well. Understand that when your mother, in her only pregnancy, gave birth to twins painfully stitched into the flesh, the bone of one child was the impossible-to-remove cloak that confers invisibility. The cloak that maimed it gave it power. Painfully stitched into the flesh, the bone of the other child was the impossible-to-remove cloak that confers visibility. The cloak that maimed it gave it power. Envying the other, of course each twin tried to punish and become the other. 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. It alone remembers your mother’s mother’s grasping immigrant bewildered stroke-filled slide-to-the-grave you wiped from your adolescent American feet. Your hick purer-than-thou overreaching veiling mediocrity. Understand that you can delude others but not what you more and more now call the beast within you. Understand the cloak that maimed each gave each power. Understand that there is a beast within you that can drink till it is sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. Understand that it will use the conventions of the visible world to turn your tongue to stone. It alone knows you. It does not wish you well.These are instructions for the wrangler. II Three Fates. One fate, with three faces. Clotho      Lachesis      Atropos Thread spun by one from all those forever unspun. Thread touched by one and in touching twisted into something forever unlike all others spun. Thread touched by one and in touching withered to nothing. Atropos      Lachesis      Clotho Three, who gave us in recompense for death the first alphabet, to engrave in stone what is most evanescent, the mind.According to Hesiod, daughters of Night. • Unless teeth devour it it rots: now is its season. My teeth have sunk into firm-skinned pears so succulent time stopped. When my wife, dead now ten years, pulls her dress over her petticoats and hair, the air crackles, her hair rising tangles in ecstasy. We are electric ghosts. • You hear the strange cricket in the oven sing, and ask what it sings. This is what it sings. Because Benvenuto in my native tongue means welcome, write here lies an artist who did not recoil from residence on earth — but, truly named, welcomed it. But I mis-spoke: not wife. Servant: model: mother of my child, also now dead. • In prison, immured in the black pit where the Pope once fed Benedetto da Foiano less and less each day until God’s will, not the Pope’s own hand, killed him, — where outside my door each day the castellan repeated that darkness will teach me I am a counterfeit bat, and he a real one, — blackness, silence so unremitted I knew I had survived another day only by the malignant welcome singsong of his triumphant voice, — Benvenuto is a counterfeit bat, and I a real one, — where God had not found me worthy of seeing the sun even in a dream, I asked the God of Nature what unexpiated act the suffocation of my senses, such suffering, served to expiate. (This was my first prison.) • For the two murders I had committed, — their just, free but necessary cause revenge, however imperfect the justice — two successive Popes recognized the necessity and pardoned me.Absolved me. Because my fame as a maker in gold and silver preceded me, though I was hardly more than an apprentice, when Pope Clement came into possession of the second largest diamond in the world he summoned me from Florence to Rome — called me into his presence to serve him. To crown the resplendent glittering vestment covering his surplice, he wanted a golden clasp big and round as a small plate, with God the Father in half-relief above the diamond and cherubs, arms raised, below.Hurry, he said, finish it quickly,so that I may enjoy its use a little while. Pope Clement, unlike the great I now serve, was an excellent, subtle connoisseur; he approved my design. Each week he summoned me into the presence two or three times, eager to inspect my progress. Then Cecchino, my brother, two years younger than I and still beardless, died — was killed, as he tried to avenge the unjust killing of a comrade by the ruthless guard of the Bargello. Thus was stolen from him the chance to incise his presence into the hard, careless surface of the world. The fool who killed him in what justice must call self-defense later proved his nature by boasting of it. His boasting enraged, maddened me. In this great grief the Pope rebuked me:You act as if grief can change death. Sleepless, eatless, by day I worked at the Pope’s absorbing golden button — and by night, hypnotized as a jealous lover, I watched and followed the fatuous creature who murdered my brother. At last, overcoming my repugnance to an enterprise not-quite-praiseworthy, I decided to end my torment. My dagger entered the juncture of the nape-bone and the neck so deep into the bone with all my strength I could not pull it out. I ran to the palace of Duke Alessandro — for those who pursued me knew me. The Pope’s natural son, later he became Duke of Florence, before his murder by his own cousin Lorenzino, whose too-familiar intimacies and pretensions to power he not only indulged but openly mocked. Alessandro told me to stay indoors for eight days. For eight days I stayed indoors, working at the jewel the Pope had set his heart on. For eight days the Pope failed to summon me. Then his chamberlain, saying that all was well if I minded my work and kept silent, ushered me into the presence. The Pope cast so menacing a glance toward me I trembled. Examining my work, his countenance cleared, saying that I had accomplished a vast amount in a short time. Then he said,Now that you are cured,Benvenuto — change your life. I promised that I would.  Soon after this, I opened a fine shop, my first; and finished the jewel. • As the knife descended (forgive me, O God of Nature, but thus you have arranged it, —) to my fevered mind each moment was infinite, and mine. • Late one night, in farewell, Michelangelo turning to me said,Benvenuto, you deliver yourself into their hands. • Here I leapt   Here I leapt   Here I leapt   Here I leapt the shrilling cricket in the shrilling summer evening sings; as did my father in the sweet years he served the pleasure of the lords of Florence as a piper, in the Consort of Pipers. Imagine my father, no longer young, married, still childless, an engineer who designs bridges and battlements for the Duke, but whose first love is music — the flute. He joined the Duke’s Consort of Pipers. Now his nights often are spent not bending over charts and plans but dazzled at the court of Lorenzo, called The Magnificent— the same Lorenzo who once plucked Michelangelo, still a boy, from among the horde of the merely-talented bending to copy the masters in the ducal palace. Lorenzo, with his father’s consent, adopted the boy; fed him at his own table. Imagine, tonight, the brief concert is over — the Consort of Pipers (respectable, honorable amateurs: small merchants, a banker, a scholar) mingle, slightly awed, with an ambassador, a Cardinal . . . Suddenly Lorenzo is at my father’s ear:He stood not six inches from me. Not six inches from my father’s ear Lorenzo in a low voice as he begins to move through the crowd followed by his son Piero (as now my father must struggle to follow) tells my father he has painfully and increasingly remarked that the flute has led my father to neglect his fine engineering talent and therefore my father will understand why Piero and the Duke must dismiss him from the Consort of Pipers. Lorenzo, entering the private apartments, was gone. In later years, my father repeated to his children:He stood not six inches from me. It is a lie. It is a lie that the Medici and you and I stand on the same earth. What the sane eye saw, was a lie: — two things alone cross the illimitable distance between the great and the rest of us, who serve them: — a knife; and art. • The emblem of Florence is the lion; therefore lions, caged but restless and living, centuries ago began to announce to the Piazza della Signoria this is the fearsome seat of the free government of the Republic of Florence. Duke Cosimo, hating the noise and smell, had them moved behind the palace. For years, I had known the old man who fed and tended the lions, — one day he humbly asked me if I could make a ring unlike all others for his daughter’s wedding. I said yes, of course; but, as payment for its rarity, I wanted him to drug the strongest lion asleep, so that I could examine, for my art, his body. He said he knew no art of drugging; such poison could kill the creature; a week later, in fury he said yes. The animal was numbed but not sleeping; he tried to raise his great head, as I lay lengthwise against his warm body; the head fell back. My head nestling behind his, each arm, outstretched, slowly descending along each leg, at last with both hands I pulled back the fur and touched a claw. This creature whose claw waking could kill me, — . . . I wore its skin. • After the Medici were returned from eighteen years’ banishment, placed over us again not by the will of Florentines, but by a Spanish army — my father, though during the republic he regained his position as piper, ever loyal to the Medici wrote a poem celebrating his party’s victory and prophesying the imminent advent of a Medici pope. Then Julius II died; Cardinal de’ Medici, against expectation, was elected; the new pope wrote my father that he must come to Rome and serve him. My father had no will to travel. Then Jacopo Salviati, in power because married to a Medici, took from my father his place at the Duke’s new court; took from him his profit, his hope, his will. Thus began that slow extinguishment of hope, the self ’s obsequies for the self at which effacement I felt not only a helpless witness, but cause, author. He said I was his heart. I had asked to be his heart before I knew what I was asking. Against his mania to make me a musician at fifteen I put myself to the goldsmith’s trade; without money or position, he now could not oppose this. Help the boy — for his father is poor rang in my ears as I began to sell the first trinkets I had made. Later, to escape the plague then raging, he made me quickly leave Florence; when I returned, he, my sister, her husband and child, were dead. These events, many occurring before my birth, I see because my father described them often and with outrage. To be a child is to see things and not know them; then you know them. • Despite the malicious stars, decisive at my birth: despite their sufficient instrument,the hand within me that moves against me: in the utter darkness of my first prison God granted me vision: surrounded by my stinks, an Angel, his beauty austere, not wanton, graciously showed me a room in half-light crowded with the dead: postures blunted as if all promise of change was lost, the dead walked up and down and back and forth: as if the promise of change fleeing had stolen the light. Then, on the wall, there was a square of light. Careless of blindness I turned my eyes to the full sun. I did not care to look on anything again but this. The sun withering and quickening without distinction then bulged out: the boss expanded: the calm body of the dead Christ formed itself from the same substance as the sun. Still on the cross, he was the same substance as the sun. • The bait the Duke laid was Perseus. Perseus standing before the Piazza della Signoria. My statue’s audience and theater, Michelangelo’s David; Donatello’s Judith With the Head of Holofernes. . . Here the school of Florence, swaggering, says to the world:Eat. Only Bandinelli’s odious Hercules and Cacus reminds one that when one walks streets on earth one steps in shit. Duke Cosimo desired, he said, a statue of Perseus triumphant, after intricate trials able at last to raise high Medusa’s mutilated head — he imagined, perhaps, decapitation of the fickle rabble of republican Florence . . . I conceived the hero’s gesture as more generous: — Kill the thing that looked upon makes us stone. Soon enough, on my great bronze bust of the great Duke, I placed — staring out from his chest — Medusa, her head not yet cut, living. • Remember,Benvenuto,you cannot bring your great gifts to light by your strength alone You show your greatness only through the opportunities we give you Hold your tongue     I will drown you in gold • As we stared down at the vast square, at David, at J udith— then at Hercules and Cacus approved and placed there by Cosimo himself — from high on the fortress lookout of the palace, against whose severe façade so many human promises had been so cunningly or indifferently crushed, I told the Duke that I cannot make his statue. My brief return from France was designed only to provide for the future of my sister and six nieces, now without husband or father. The King of France alone had saved me from the Pope’s dungeon — not any lord of Italy! At this, the Duke looked at me sharply, but said nothing. All Rome knew that though I had disproved the theft that was pretext for my arrest, Pope Paul still kept me imprisoned, out of spite — vengeance of his malignant son Pier Luigi, now assassinated by his own retainers. One night at dinner, the King’s emissary gave the Pope gossip so delicious that out of merriment, and about to vomit from indulgence, he agreed to free me. I owed King Francis my art, my service. The same stipend he once paid Leonardo, he now paid me; along with a house in Paris. This house was, in truth, a castle . . . I omitted, of course, quarrels with the King’s mistress, demon who taunted me for the slowness of my work, out of her petty hatred of art itself; omitted her insistence to the King that I am insolent and by example teach insolence to others. Omitted that I overheard the King joke with her lieutenant: — Kill him, if you can find me his equal in art. Before the school of Florence I had only been able, young, to show myself as goldsmith and jeweler; not yet as sculptor. Duke Cosimo then announced that all the King of France had given me, he would surpass: boasting, he beckoned me to follow him past the public common galleries, into the private apartments . . . Dutiful abashed puppet, I followed; I knew I would remain and make his statue. • In the mirror of art,you who are familiar with the rituals of decorum and bloodshed before which you are silence and submission while within stone the mind writhes contemplate,as if a refrain were wisdom,the glistening intrication of bronze and will and circumstance in the mirror of art. • Bandinelli for months insinuated in the Duke’s ear Perseus never would be finished: — I lacked the art, he said, to move from the small wax model the Duke rightly praised, to lifesize bronze whose secrets tormented even Donatello. So eighteen months after work began, Duke Cosimo grew tired, and withdrew his subsidy. Lattanzo Gorini, spider-handed and gnat-voiced, refusing to hand over payment said,Why do you not finish? Then Bandinelli hissed Sodomite! at me — after my enumeration, to the court’s amusement, of the sins against art and sense committed by his Hercules and Cacus, recital designed to kill either him or his authority . . . The Duke, at the ugly word, frowned and turned away. I replied that the sculptor of Hercules and Cacus must be a madman to think that I presumed to understand the art that Jove in heaven used on Ganymede, art nobly practiced here on earth by so many emperors and kings. My saucy speech ended:My poor wick does not dare to burn so high! Duke and court broke into laughter. Thus was born my resolve to murder Bandinelli. • I’d hurl the creature to hell. In despair at what must follow — the Duke’s rage, abandonment of my never-to-be-born Perseus — I cast myself away for lost: with a hundred crowns and a swift horse, I resolved first to bid farewell to my natural son, put to wet-nurse in Fiesole; then to descend to San Domenico, where Bandinelli returned each evening.Then,after blood,France. Reaching Fiesole, I saw the boy was in good health; his wet-nurse was my old familiar, old gossip, now married to one of my workmen. The boy clung to me: wonderful in a two-year-old, in grief he flailed his arms when at last in the thick half-dusk I began to disengage myself. Entering the square of San Domenico on one side, I saw my prey arriving on the other. Enraged that he still drew breath, when I reached him I saw he was unarmed. He rode a small sorry mule. A wheezing donkey carried a ten-year-old boy at his side. In my sudden presence, his face went white. I nodded my head and rode past. • I had a vision of Bandinelli surrounded by the heaped-up works of his hand. Not one thing that he had made did I want to have made. From somewhere within his body like a thread he spun the piles surrounding him. Then he tried to pull away, to release the thread; I saw the thread was a leash. He tried and tried to cut it. At this, in my vision I said out-loud: — My art is my revenge. • When I returned to Florence from Fiesole, after three days news was brought to me that my little boy was smothered by his wet-nurse turning over on him as they both slept. His panic, as I left; his arms raised, in panic. • from the great unchosen narration you will soon be released Benvenuto Cellini dirtied by blood and earth but now you have again taught yourself to disappear moving wax from arm to thigh you have again taught yourself to disappear here where each soul is its orbit spinning sweetly around the center of itself at the edge of its eye the great design of virtue here your Medusa and your Perseus are twins his triumphant body still furious with purpose but his face abstracted absorbed in contemplation as she is abstracted absorbed though blood still spurts from her neck defeated by a mirror as in concentration you move wax from thigh to arm under your hand it grows • The idyll began when the Duke reached me a goldsmith’s hammer, with which I struck the goldsmith’s chisel he held; and so the little statues were disengaged from earth and rust. Bronze antiquities, newly found near Arezzo, they lacked either head or hands or feet. Impatient for my presence, the Duke insisted that I join him each evening at his new pastime, playing artisan — leaving orders for my free admittance to his rooms, day or night. His four boys, when the Duke’s eyes were turned, hovered around me, teasing. One night I begged them to hold their peace. The boldest replied,That we can’t do! I said what one cannot do is required of no one. So have your will! Faced with their sons’ delight in this new principle, the Duke and Duchess smiling accused me of a taste for chaos . . . At last the four figures wrought for the four facets of the pedestal beneath Perseus were finished. I brought them one evening to the Duke, arranging them on his worktable in a row: — figures,postures from scenes that the eye cannot entirely decipher,story haunting the eye with its resonance, unseen ground that explains nothing. . . The Duke appeared, then immediately retreated; reappearing, in his right hand he held a pear slip.This is for your garden,the garden of your house. I began,Do you mean, but he cut me off saying,Yes,Benvenuto:garden and house now are yours. Thus I received what earlier was only lent me. I thanked him and his Duchess; then both took seats before my figures. For two hours talk was of their beauty, — the Duchess insisted they were too exquisite to be wasted down there in the piazza; I must place them in her apartments. No argument from intention or design unconvinced her. So I waited till the next day — entering the private chambers at the hour the Duke and Duchess each afternoon went riding, I carried the statues down and soldered them with lead into their niches. Returning, how angry the Duchess became! The Duke abandoned his workshop. I went there no more. • The old inertia of earth that hates the new (as from a rim I watched) rose from the ground, legion: — truceless ministers of the great unerasable ZERO, eager to annihilate lineament and light, waited, pent, against the horizon: — some great force (massive,stubborn,multiform as earth,fury whose single name is LEGION, — ) wanted my Perseus not to exist: — and I must defeat them. Then my trembling assistants woke me. They said all my work was spoiled. Perseus was spoiled. He lay buried in earth wreathed in fragile earthenware veins from the furnace above, veins through which he still waited to be filled with burning metal. The metal was curdled. As I slept, sick, the bronze had been allowed to cake, to curdle. Feverish, made sick by my exertions for days, for months, I slept; while those charged with evenly feeding the furnace that I had so well prepared, LARKED — I thought,Unwitting ministers of the gorgon Medusa herself. The furnace choked with caking, curdling metal that no art known to man could uncurdle, must be utterly dismantled — all who made it agreed this must destroy the fragile, thirsty mould of Perseus beneath. But Perseus was not more strong than Medusa, but more clever: — if he ever was to exist as idea, he must first exist as matter: — all my old inborn daring returned, furious to reverse the unjust triumphs of the world’s mere arrangements of power, that seemingly on earth cannot be reversed. First, I surveyed my forces: — seven guilty workmen, timid, sullen, resentful; a groom; two maids; a cook. I harassed these skeptical troops into battle: — two hands were sent to fetch from the butcher Capretta a load of young oak, — in bronze furnaces the only woods you use are slow-burning alder, willow, pine: now I needed oak and its fierce heat. As the oak was fed log by log into the fire, how the cake began to stir, to glow and sparkle. Now from the increased combustion of the furnace, a conflagration shot up from the roof: two windows burst into flame: I saw the violent storm filling the sky fan the flames. All the while with pokers and iron rods we stirred and stirred the channels— the metal, bubbling, refused to flow. I sent for all my pewter plates, dishes, porringers — the cook and maids brought some two hundred. Piece by piece, I had them thrown into the turgid mass. As I watched the metal for movement, the cap of the furnace exploded — bronze welling over on all sides. I had the plugs pulled, the mouths of the mould opened; in perfect liquefaction the veins of Perseus filled . . . Days later, when the bronze had cooled, when the clay sheath had been with great care removed, I found what was dead brought to life again. • Now, my second prison. It began soon after Perseus was unveiled to acclaim — great acclaim. Perhaps I grew too glorious. Perseus, whose birth consumed nine years, found stuck to his pedestal sonnets celebrating the master’s hand that made him . . . On the day of unveiling, Duke Cosimo stationed himself at a window just above the entrance to the palace; there, half-hidden, he listened for hours to the crowd’s wonder. He sent his attendant Sforza to say my reward soon would astonish me. Ten days passed. At last Sforza appeared and asked what price I placed on my statue. I was indeed astonished:It is not my custom, I replied,to set a price for my work,as if he were a merchant and I a mere tradesman. Then, at risk of the Duke’s severe displeasure, I was warned I must set a price: infuriated, I said ten thousand golden crowns. Cities and great palaces are built with ten thousand golden crowns, the Duke two days later flung at me in anger. Many men can build cities and palaces, I replied,but not one can make a second Perseus. Bandinelli, consulted by the Duke, reluctantly concluded that the statue was worth sixteen thousand. The Duke replied that for two farthings Perseus could go to the scrap heap; that would resolve our differences. At last, the settlement was thirty-five hundred, one hundred a month. Soon after, charges were brought against me, for sodomy — I escaped Florence as far as Scarperia, but there the Duke’s soldiers caught me and in chains brought me back. I confessed. If I had not, I could have been made to serve as a slave in the Duke’s galleys for life. The Duke listened behind a screen as I was made publicly to confess, in full court . . . Punishment was four years imprisonment. Without the Duke’s concurrence, of course, no charges could have been lodged, no public humiliation arranged to silence the insolent.The first Cosimo,founder of Medici power,all his life protected Donatello—whose affections and bliss were found in Ganymede. After imprisonment one month, Cosimo finally commuted my sentence to house arrest. There his magnanimity allowed me to complete my Christ of the whitest marble set upon a cross of the blackest. Now, my Christ sits still packed in a crate in the Duke’s new chapel; my bust of the Duke is exiled to Elba, there to frighten in open air slaves peering out from his passing galleys. Now, after the Duchess and two of their sons died of fever within two months, Cosimo grows stranger: he murdered Sforza by running him through with a spear: — he does not own his mind; or will. When I ask release from his service, he says that he cannot, that he soon will have need of me for great projects; no commissions come. Catherine de’ Medici, regent of the young French king, petitioned that I be allowed to enter her service. He said I had no will now to work. In prison I wrote my sonnet addressed to Fortune: —Fortune,you sow! You turned from me because Ganymede also is my joy. . . O God of Nature, author of my nature, where does your son Jesus forbid it? When I was five, one night my father woke me. He pulled me to the basement, making me stare into the oak fire and see what he just had seen. There a little lizard was sporting at the core of the intensest flames. My father boxed me on the ears, then kissed me — saying that I must remember this night: — My dear little boy,the lizard you see is a salamander,a creature that lives at the heart of fire.You and I are blessed:no other soul now living has been allowed to see it. • I am too old to fight to leave Florence: — here, young, this goldsmith and jeweler began to imagine that severity, that chastity of style certain remnants of the ancient world left my hand hungry to emulate: — equilibrium of ferocious, contradictory forces: equilibrium whose balance or poise is their tension, and does not efface them, — as if the surface of each thing arranged within the frame, the surface of each body the eye must circle gives up to the eye its vibration, its nature. Two or three times, perhaps,—you say where, — I have achieved it. • See, in my great bronze bust of the great Duke, embedded in the right epaulette like a trophy an open-mouthed face part lion part man part goat, with an iron bar jammed in its lower jaw rising resistlessly across its mouth. See, in Vasari’s clumsy portrait of me, as I float above the right shoulder of the Duke, the same face.” • As if your hand fumbling to reach inside reached inside As if light falling on the surface fell on what made the surface As if there were no scarcity of sun on the sun III I covered my arm with orchid juice. With my hatchet I split a mangrove stick from a tree, and sharpened it. I covered the killing stick with orchid juice. We were camping at Marunga Island looking for oysters. This woman I was about to kill at last separated herself from the others to hunt lilies. She walked into the swamp, then got cold, and lay down on sandy ground. After I hit her between the eyes with my hatchet she kicked, but couldn’t raise up. With my thumb over the end of the killing stick I jabbed her Mount of Venus until her skin pushed back up to her navel. Her large intestine protruded as though it were red calico. With my thumb over the end of the killing stick each time she inhaled I pushed my arm in a little. When she exhaled, I stopped. Little by little I got my hand inside her. Finally I touched her heart. Once you reach what is inside it is outside. I pushed the killing stick into her heart. The spirit that belonged to that dead woman went into my heart then. I felt it go in. I pulled my arm out. I covered my arm with orchid juice. Next I broke a nest of green ants off a tree, and watched the live ants bite her skin until her skin moved by itself downward from her navel and covered her bones. Then I took some dry mud and put my sweat and her blood in the dry mud and warmed it over a fire. Six or eight times I put the blood and sweat and mud inside her uterus until there was no trace of her wound or what I had done. I was careful none of her pubic hair was left inside her vagina for her husband to feel. Her large intestine stuck out several feet. When I shook some green ants on it, a little went in. I shook some more. All of it went in. When I whirled the killing stick with her heart’s blood over her head, her head moved. When I whirled it some more, she moved more. The third time I whirled the killing stick she gasped for breath. She blew some breath out of her mouth, and was all right. I said,You go eat some lilies. She got up. I said,You will live two days.One day you will be happy.The next,sick. She ate some lilies. She walked around, then came back and slept. When laughing and talking women woke her she gathered her lilies and returned to camp. The next day she walked around and played, talked and made fun, gathering with others oysters and lilies. She brought into camp what she gathered. That night she lay down and died. Even the gods cannot end death. In this universe anybody can kill anybody with a stick. What the gods gave me is their gift, the power to bury within each creature the hour it ceases. Everyone knows I have powers but not such power. If they knew I would be so famous they would kill me. I tell you because your tongue is stone. If the gods ever give you words, one night in sleep you will wake to find me above you. • After sex & metaphysics, — . . . what? What you have made. • Infinite the forms,finite tonight as I find again in the mirror the familiar appeaseless eater’s face Ignorant of cause or source or end in silence he repeats Eater,become food All life exists at the expense of other life Because you have eaten and eat as eat you must Eater,become food unlike the burning stars burning merely to be Then I ask him how to become food In silence he repeats that others have other fates,but that I must fashion out of the corruptible body a new body good to eat a thousand years Then I tell the eater’s face that within me is no sustenance,on my famished plate centuries have been served me and still I am famished He smirks,and in silence repeats that all life exists at the expense of other life You must fashion out of the corruptible body a new body good to eat a thousand years Because you have eaten and eat as eat you must ignorant of cause or source or end • 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 • This is the end of the third hour of the night.

At first I felt shame because I had entered through the door marked Your Death. Not a valuable word written unsteeped in your death. You are the ruin whose arm encircles the young woman at the posthumous bar, before your death. The grass is still hungry above you, fed by your death. Kill whatever killed your father, your life turning to me again said before your death. Hard to grow old still hungry. You were still hungry at your death.

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 now, when he stares there, he gets angry:— something unfulfilled there, something dead to what he once thought he surely could be— Now, just the glamour of habits . . . Once, instead, he thought insight would remake him, he'd reach —what? The thrill, the exhilaration unravelling disaster, that seemed to teach necessary knowledge . . . became just jargon. Sick of being decent, he craves another crash. What reaches him except disaster?

As the retreating Bructeri began to burn their own possessions, to deny to the Romans every sustenance but ashes, a flying column sent by Germanicus commanded by Lucius Stertinius routed them; and there, discovered amid plunder and the dead, was the Eagle of the nineteenth legion, lost with Varus. * The Romans now brought to the land of the Bructeri,—to whatever lay between the river Ems and the river Lippe, to the very edge of their territory,— devastation; until they reached at last the Teutoburgian Wood, in whose darkness Varus and the remains of his fifteen thousand men, it was said, lay unburied. * Germanicus then conceived a desire to honor with obsequies these unburied warriors whose massacre once filled Augustus himself with rage and shame,— with hope or fear every corner of the Empire,— while the least foot soldier, facing alien terrain, was overcome with pity when he thought of family, friends, the sudden reversals of battle, and shared human fate. * First Caecina and his men entered,— ordered to reconnoitre the dismal treacherous passes, to attempt to build bridges and causeways across the uneven, sodden marshland,— then the rest of the army, witness to scenes rending to sight and memory of sight. * Varus’ first camp, with its wide sweep and deployment of ordered space in confident dimension, testified to the calm labors of three legions;— then a ruined half-wall and shallow ditch showed where a desperate remnant had been driven to take cover;— on the open ground between them were whitening bones, free from putrefaction,— scattered where men had been struck down fleeing, heaped up where they had stood their ground before slaughter. Fragments of spears and horses’ limbs lay intertwined, while human skulls were nailed like insults to the tree-trunks. Nearby groves held the altars on which the savage Germans sacrificed the tribunes and chief centurions. * Survivors of the catastrophe slowly began, at last, to speak,— the handful who had escaped death or slavery told their fellow soldiers where the generals fell, how the Eagles and standards were seized;— one showed where Varus received his first wound, and another, where he died by his own melancholy hand;— those thrown into crude pits saw gibbets above them, as well as the platform from which Arminius as if in delirium harangued his own victorious troops,— fury and rancor so joined to his joy, the imprisoned men thought they would soon be butchered,— until desecration of the Eagles at last satisfied or exhausted his arrogance. * And so, six years after the slaughter, a living Roman army had returned to bury the dead men’s bones of three whole legions,— no man knew whether the remains that he had gathered, touched perhaps in consigning to the earth, were those of a stranger or a friend:— all thought of all as comrades and bloodbrothers; each, in common rising fury against the enemy, mourned at once and hated. * When these events were reported to Rome Cynics whispered that thus the cunning State enslaves us to its failures and its fate.— Epicureans saw in the ghostly mire an emblem of the nature of Desire.— Stoics replied that life is War, ILLUSION the source, the goal, the end of human action. * At the dedication of the funeral mound, Germanicus laid the first earth,— thereby honoring the dead, and choosing to demonstrate in his own person his heartfelt share in the general grief. He thereby earned the disapproval of Tiberius,— perhaps because the Emperor interpreted every action of Germanicus unfavorably; or he may have felt the spectacle of the unburied dead must give the army less alacrity for battle and more respect for the enemy— while a commander belonging to the antique priesthood of the Augurs pollutes himself by handling objects belonging to the dead. * on the open ground whitening bones scattered where men had been struck down fleeing heaped up where they stood their ground Varus’ first camp with its wide sweep across the open ground the ruined half-wall and shallow ditch on the open ground between them whitening bones scattered where men had been struck down fleeing heaped up where they stood their ground

Each grinding flattened American vowel smashed to centerlessness, his glee that whatever long ago mutilated his mouth, he has mastered to mutilate you: the Joker's voice, so unlike the bruised, withheld, wounded voice of Ennis Del Mar. Once I have the voice that's the line and at the end of the line is a hook and attached to that is the soul.

the remnant of a vast, oceanic bruise (wound delivered early and long ago) was in you purity and sweetness self-gathered, CHOSEN • When I tried to find words for the moral sense that unifies and sweetens the country voices in your collage The Friendly Way, you said It'sa code. You were a code I yearned to decipher.— In the end, the plague that full swift runs by took you, broke you;— in the end, could not take you, did not break you— you had somehow erased within you not only meanness, but anger, the desire to punish the universe for everything not achieved,not tasted, seen again, touched—; . . . the undecipherable code unbroken even as the soul learns once again the body it loves and hates is made of earth, and will betray it.

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, it is a vast resonating chamber in which each thing you say or do is new, but the same.What none knows is how to change. Each plateau you reach, if single, limited, only itself, in- cludes traces of  all the others, so that in the end limitation frees you, there is no end, if   you once see what is there to see. You cannot see what is there to see — not when she whose love you failed is standing next to you. Then, as if refusing the know- ledge that life unseparated from her is death, as if again scorning your refusals, she turns away. The end achieved by the unappeased is burial within. Familiar spirit, within whose care I grew, within whose disappointment I twist, may we at last see by what necessity the double-bind is in the end the  figure  for human life, why what we love is precluded always by something else we love, as if each no we speak is yes, each yes no. The prospect is mixed but elsewhere the forecast is no better. The eyrie where you perch in exhaustion has food and is out of  the wind, if cold. You feel old, young, old, young: you scan the sea for movement, though the promise of  sex or food is the prospect that bewildered  you to this end. Something in you believes that it is not the end. When you wake, sixth grade will start. The finite you know you fear is infinite: even at eleven, what you love is what you should not love, which endless bullies in- tuit unerringly. The future will be different: you cannot see the end. What none knows is when, not if.

"When I hit her on the head, it was good, and then I did it to her a couple of times,— but it was funny,—afterwards, it was as if somebody else did it... Everything flat, without sharpness, richness or line. Still, I liked to drive past the woods where she lay, tell the old lady and the kids I had to take a piss, hop out and do it to her... The whole buggy of them waiting for me made me feel good; but still, just like I knew all along, she didn't move. When the body got too discomposed, I'd just jack off, letting it fall on her... —It sounds crazy, but I tell you sometimes it was beautiful—; I don't know how to say it, but for a minute,everything was possible—; and then, then,— well, like I said, she didn't move: and I saw, under me, a little girl was just lying there in the mud: and I knew I couldn't have done that,— somebody else had to have done that,— standing above her there, in those ordinary, shitty leaves... —One time, I went to see Dad in a motel where he was staying with a woman; but she was gone; you could smell the wine in the air; and he started, real embarrassing, to cry... He was still a little drunk, and he asked me to forgive him for all he hadn't done—; but, What the shit? Who would have wanted to stay with Mom? with bastards not even his own kids? I got in the truck, and started to drive, and saw a little girl— who I picked up, hit on the head, and screwed, and screwed, and screwed, and screwed, then buried, in the garden of the motel... —You see, ever since I was a kid I wanted to feel things make sense: I remember looking out the window of my room back home,— and being almost suffocated by the asphalt; and grass; and trees; and glass; just there, just there, doing nothing! not saying anything! filling me up— but also being a wall; dead, and stopping me; —how I wanted to see beneath it, cut beneath it, and make it somehow, come alive... The salt of the earth; Mom once said, 'Man's spunk is the salt of the earth...' —That night, at that Twenty-nine Palms Motel I had passed a million times on the road, everything fit together; was alright; it seemed like everything had to be there, like I had spent years trying, and at last finally finished drawing this huge circle... —But then, suddenly I knew somebody else did it, some bastard had hurt a little girl—; the motel I could see again, it had been itself all the time, a lousy pile of bricks, plaster, that didn't seem to have to be there,—but was, just by chance... —Once, on the farm, when I was a kid, I was screwing a goat; and the rope around his neck when he tried to get away pulled tight;—and just when I came, he died... I came back the next day; jacked off over his body; but it didn't do any good... Mom once said: 'Man's spunk is the salt of the earth, and grows kids.' I tried so hard to come; more pain than anything else; but didn't do any good... —About six months ago, I heard Dad remarried, so I drove over to Connecticut to see him and see if he was happy. She was twenty-five years younger than him: she had lots of little kids, and I don't know why, I felt shaky... I stopped in front of the address; and snuck up to the window to look in... —There he was, a kid six months old on his lap, laughing and bouncing the kid, happy in his old age to play the papa after years of sleeping around,— it twisted me up... To think that what he wouldn't give me, he wanted to give them... I could have killed the bastard... —Naturally, I just got right back in the car, and believe me, was determined, determined, to head straight for home... but the more I drove, I kept thinking about getting a girl, and the more I thought I shouldn't do it, the more I had to— I saw her coming out of the movies, saw she was alone, and kept circling the blocks as she walked along them, saying, 'You're going to leave her alone.' 'You're going to leave her alone.' —The woods were scary! As the seasons changed, and you saw more and more of the skull show through, the nights became clearer, and the buds,—erect, like nipples... —But then, one night, nothing worked... Nothing in the sky would blur like I wanted it to; and I couldn't,couldn't, get it to seem to me that somebody else did it... I tried, and tried, but there was just me there, and her, and the sharp trees saying, 'That's you standing there. You're... just you.' I hope I fry. —Hell came when I saw MYSELF... and couldn't stand what I see..."

I To see my father lying in pink velvet, a rosary twined around his hands, rouged, lipsticked, his skin marble ... My mother said, “He looks the way he did thirty years ago, the day we got married,— I’m glad I went; I was afraid: now I can remember him like that ...” Ruth, your last girlfriend, who wouldn’t sleep with you or marry, because you wanted her to pay half the expenses, and “His drinking almost drove me crazy—” Ruth once saw you staring into a mirror, in your ubiquitous kerchief and cowboy hat, say: “Why can’t I look like a cowboy?” You left a bag of money; and were the unhappiest man I have ever known well. II It’s in many ways a relief to have you dead. I have more money. Bakersfield is easier: life isn’t so nude, now that I no longer have to face you each evening: mother is progressing beautifully in therapy, I can almost convince myself a good analyst would have saved you: for I need to believe, as always, that your pervasive sense of disappointment proceeded from trivial desires: but I fear that beneath the wish to be a movie star, cowboy, empire builder, all those cheap desires, lay radical disaffection from the very possibilities of human life ... Your wishes were too simple: or too complex. III I find it difficult to imagine you in bed, making love to a woman ... By common consensus, you were a good lover: and yet, mother once said: “Marriage would be better if it weren’t mixed up with sex ...” Just after the divorce,—when I was about five,—I slept all night with you in a motel, and again and again you begged me to beg her to come back ... I said nothing; but she went back several times, again and again you would go on a binge, there would be another woman, mother would leave ... You always said, “Your mother is the only woman I’ve ever loved.” IV Oh Shank, don’t turn into the lies of mere, neat poetry ... I’ve been reading Jung, and he says that we can never get to the bottom of what is, or was ... But why things were as they were obsesses; I know that you the necessity to contend with you your helplessness before yourself, —has been at the center of how I think my life ... And yet your voice, raw, demanding, dissatisfied, saying over the telephone: “How are all those bastards at Harvard?” remains, challenging: beyond all the patterns and paradigms I use to silence and stop it. V I dreamed I had my wish: —I seemed to see the conditions of my life, upon a luminous stage: how I could change, how I could not: the root of necessity, and choice. The stage was labelled “Insight”. The actors there had no faces, I cannot remember the patterns of their actions, but simply by watching, I knew that beneath my feet the fixed stars governing my life had begun to fall, and melt ... —Then your face appeared, laughing at the simplicity of my wish. VI Almost every day I take out the letter you wrote me in Paris. ... Why? It was written the year before you married Shirley; Myrtle, your girlfriend, was an ally of mine because she “took care of you,” but you always made it clear she was too dumpy and crude to marry ... In some ways “elegant,” with a pencil-thin, neatly clipped moustache, chiselled, Roman nose, you were a millionaire and always pretended you couldn’t afford to go to Europe ... When I was a child, you didn’t seem to care if I existed. Bakersfield, Calif July 9, 1961 Dear Pinon, Sorry I haven’t wrote to you sooner but glad to hear that you are well and enjoying Paris. I got your fathers day wire in the hospital where I put in about twelve days but I am very well now. I quit the ciggeretts but went through ten days of hell quitting and my back had been giving me hell. It had been very hot here but the last few days has been very nice. Emily just got out of the hospital yesterday. She had her feet worked on. I guess she will tell you about it. Glad to hear you are learning some French. We are just about through with potatoes. Crop was very good but no price at all which made it a poor year. Cattle are cheap too. It look like a bad year for all farmer’s. I don’t know anything else to tell you. Take care of your self and enjoy it. Maybe you will never have another chance for another trip. I don’t think I’ll ever get the chance to go, so if you run into a extra special gal between 28 & 35 send her over here to me as all I know over here don’t amount to mutch. Well I guess I’ll close now as I am going over to see Emily. Hoping to hear from you right away. This address is 4019 Eton St. be sure and get it straight. Myrtle would like to know how much that watch amounts to. Let us know Will close now and write soon. Love ‘Shank’ P.S. Excuse this writing as its about 30 years since I wrote a letter. VII How can I say this? I think my psychiatrist likes me: he knows the most terrible things I’ve done, every stupidity, inadequacy, awkwardness, ignorance, the mad girl I screwed because she once again and again teased and rejected me, and whose psychic incompetence I grimly greeted as an occasion for revenge; he greets my voice with an interest, and regard, and affection, which seem to signal I’m worth love; —you finally forgave me for being your son, and in the nasty shambles of your life, in which you had less and less occasion for pride, you were proud of me, the first Bidart who ever got a B.A.; Harvard, despite your distrust, was the crown;—but the way you eyed me: the bewilderment, unease: the somehow always tentative, suspended judgment ... —however much you tried (and, clearly, you did try) you could not remake your taste, and like me: could not remake yourself, to give me the grace needed to look in a mirror, as I often can now, with some equanimity ... VIII When did I begin to substitute insight, for prayer? ... —You believed in neither: but said, “My life is over,” after you had married Shirley, twenty-five years younger, with three small children, the youngest six months old; she was unfaithful within two months, the marriage was simply annulled ... A diabetic, you didn’t take your insulin when you drank, and almost managed to die many times ... You punished Ruth when she went to Los Angeles for a weekend, by beginning to drink; she would return home either to find you in the hospital, or in a coma on the floor ... The exacerbation of this seeming necessity for connection—; you and mother taught me there’s little that’s redemptive or useful in natural affections ... I must unlearn; I must believe you were merely a man with a character, and a past—; you wore them, unexamined, like a nimbus of furies round your greying, awesome head ... IX What should I have done? In 1963, you wanted to borrow ten thousand dollars from me, so that we could buy cattle together, under the name “Bidart and Son,”— most of your money was tied up in the increasingly noxious “Bidart Brothers,” run by your brother, Johnny ... I said no, that I wanted to use the money for graduate school; but I thought if you went on a binge, and as had happened before, simply threw it away ... The Bidarts agreed you were not to be trusted; you accepted my answer, with an air of inevitability I was shocked at ... I didn’t want to see your self-disgust; —somehow, your self-congratulation had eroded more deeply, much more deeply, than even I had wished,— but for years, how I had wished! ... I have a friend who says that he has never felt a conflict between something deeply wished or desired, and what he thought was “moral” ... Father, such innocence surely is a kind of Eden—; but, somehow, I can’t regret that we are banished from that company—; in the awareness, the history of our contradictions and violence, insofar as I am “moral” at all, is the beginning of my moral being. X When I began this poem, to see myself as a piece of history, having a past which shapes, and informs, and thus inevitably limits— at first this seemed sufficient, the beginning of freedom ... The way to approach freedom was to acknowledge necessity:— I sensed I had to become not merely a speaker, the “eye,” but a character ... And you had to become a character: with a past, with a set of internal contradictions and necessities which if I could once define, would at least begin to release us from each other ... But, of course, no such knowledge is possible;— as I touch your photographs, they stare back at me with the dazzling, impenetrable, glitter of mere life ... You stand smiling, at the end of the twenties, in a suit, and hat, cane and spats, with a collie at your feet, happy to be handsome, dashing, elegant:— and though I cannot connect this image with the end of your life, with the defensive gnarled would-be cowboy,— you seem happy at that fact, happy to be surprising; unknowable; unpossessable ... You say it’s what you always understood by freedom. 1968-69.