For an Unwritten Opera

##### For an Unwritten OperaFrank Bidart

Once you had a secret love: seeing

even his photo, a window is flung open

high in the airless edifice that is you.

Though everything looks as if it is continuing

just as before, it is not, it is continuing

in a new way (sweet lingo O’Hara and Ashbery

teach). That’s not how you naturally speak:

you tell yourself, first, that he is not the air

you need; second, that you loathe air.

As a boy you despised the world for replacing

God with another addiction, love.

Despised yourself. Was there no third thing?

But every blue moon the skeptical, the adamantly

disabused find themselves, like you,

returned to life by a secret: like him, in you.

Now you understand Janácek at

seventy, in love with a much younger

married woman, chastely writing her.

As in Mozart song remains no matter how

ordinary, how flawed the personae. For us poor

mortals: private accommodations. Magpie beauty.

###### MARGINALIA

Because it is the sixteenth, and Bach’s Air happens to be playing. I would have drank wine as I try to wax philosophical about your ghost, but the reality is: this is pathetic; I am pathetic. Someday my poor heart will redeem itself.

###### ABOUT FRANK BIDART

Frank Bidart was born in Bakersfield, California, on May 27, 1939. Bidart’s early books are collected in *In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–90* (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). His recent volumes include *Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016* (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), *Metaphysical Dog: Poems* (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); *Watching the Spring Festival: Poems* (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); *Star Dust* (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); *Music Like Dirt* (Sarabande Books); and *Desire* (Farrar,… [(more)](#)

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