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don't worry I know you're dead but tonight turn your face again toward me when I hear your voice there is now no direction in which to turn I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and but tonight turn your face again toward me see upon my shoulders is the yoke that is not a yoke don't worry I know you're dead but tonight turn your face again
From Desire (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Copyright © 1997 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by permission of the author.
You must not think that what I have accomplished through you could have been accomplished by any other means. Each of us is to himself indelible. I had to become that which could not be, by time, from human memory, erased. I had to burn my hungry, unappeasable furious spirit so inconsolably into you you would without cease write to bring me rest. Bring us rest. Guilt is fecund. I knew nothing I made myself had enough steel in it to survive. I tried: I made beautiful paintings, beautiful poems. Fluff.
Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.
Everybody already knows everything
so you can
lie to them. That's what they want.
But lie to yourself, what you will
lose is yourself. Then you
turn into them.
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