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Edited on Tue Oct-27-09 07:18 AM by BlueIris
"If See No End In This"
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 burial within.
Familiar spirit, within whose care I grew, within whose disappointment I twist, may we at last see what necessity the double-bind is in the end the figure of 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 that end. What none knows is when, not if.
--Frank Bidart
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