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heaped up
where they stood their ground
Varus'jirst camp with its
wide sweep
across the open ground
the ruined
half-wall and shallow ditch
PARTISAN REVIEW
on the open ground betweerl them.
For Bidart, the incommensurate, closed world of the dead has emissaries;
ancient coins, like words, are a "bright circle / of appetite, risen to feed and
famish us...." Such a possibility comes into existence on the page with
the risk of a fresh finding, with the candor of "unhuman eyes / / when
they gaze upon what they desire / unstained by disgust or dread or terror."
The astonishing thirty-page poem that closes the volume, "The
Second Hour of the Night," draws on two sources. The first is a passage
from Berlioz's
Memoirs,
describing the composer's revery as he watches
over the deathbed of his wife, the Irish actress Harriet Smithson.
It
describes her human and artistic struggles, and Berlioz's guilty recollec–
tion of what he made of a woman he first glimpsed playing Ophelia; the
composer speaks of how his work and love became her fate. The second,
and more extensive, adaptation is from Ovid's
Metamorphoses,
the story of
Myrrha's tortured love for her father Cinyras.
It
follows her struggle with
her desire, its secret fulfillment , Myrrha's discovery and £light, her meta–
morphosis into a myrrh tree, the birth of the child Adonis. Myrrha, in one
way, is Smithson herself, a voice that answers Berlioz's bafflement and
pity, tracking her own wish and fantasy. But it is hard to fix persons here,
so many versions of the story does Myrrha herself suggest. Bidart's steady,
broken staging of the myth keeps strange our pictures of what it is possi–
ble to desire, how desire cares for or conceals itself. The story asks, from
whence do we inherit desire, what does our desiring for us? Myrrha, he
writes, "would anatomize the world / according to how the world / anat–
omizes DESIRE."
In
this poem, desire quickens along impossible surfaces
of fancy and recollection, even as it quickens across and through skin.
It
moves toward what is unreal, and yet embodied, what has the power to
change us.
