Poem at the End of Time
I was looking all over for it
As so often happens
It came to me
This time in the daily spittle
Email clog faucet from Anastasios
Kozaitis, poet/editor/provocator
whose Poem of the Day vitaminizes
a poem by Frank Bidart who lives
in the folds and flaps of the cerebrum
that casts knowledge as detritus
on the shores of love Mozart
in conversation these words are love
--Bob Holman
For the Twentieth Century
Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand
technologies of ecstasy
boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water
rises without boundaries,
I push the PLAY button: --
. . . Callas, Laurel & Hardy, Szigeti
you are alive again, --
the slow movement of K.218
once again no longer
bland, merely pretty, nearly
banal, as it is
in all but Szigeti’s hands
*
Therefore you and I and Mozart
must thank the Twentieth Century, for
it made you pattern, form
whose infinite
repeatability within matter
defies matter—-
Malibran. Henry Irving. The young
Joachim. They are lost, a mountain of
newspaper clippings, become words
not their own words. The art of the performer.
--Frank Bidart
