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

Frank Bidart has published five books of poetry. The first three are collected, with new poems, in In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990). His fifth volume, Desire (FSG), appeared in 1997, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Wellesley College. (Poem and bio from DIA Center for the Arts Readings in Contemporary Poetry.)