Frank Bidart

Like Lightning Across an Open Field


This age that has tried to use indeterminancy
to imagine we are free

Days and nights typing and retyping

revisions half in
relish because what you have

made is ill-made

.

Picking up the phone next to your bed
when her voice said he is dead you

stood up on your bed

Like lightning across an open field
I he said

wound the ground

.

His body had risen up to kill him
because beneath him there was no

earth where the soul could stand

.

Renewed health and renewed illness
meant the freedom

or necessity to risk a new life

Bar by bar he built meticulously
a new cage to escape each cage he built

why why why why

It is an illusion you were ever free

The voice of the bird you could not help
but respond to




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