BOOKS
. . .but you have lied about your
solace, for hidden, threaded
within repetition is the moment when each step
backward is a step
downward, when what you move toward moves toward
you lifting painfully his cloak to reveal his
wound, saying,
" love answers need" .
..
Approaching death , for days Myrrha more and more
talked to the air:-
My element
is
the sea. I have seen
the underside of the surface of the sea, the glittering
inner surface more beautifi" than the darkness below it,
seen it crossed
and re-crossed by a glittering ship from which dark eyes
peering downward must search the darkness.
Though they search, the eyes,
fix upon nothing.
343
Myrrha tells her unborn child, "listening / within her, the story of Myrrha
and Cinyras." This is Myrrha's final prayer to the gods as she is pursued:
Make me nothing
human: not alive, not dead.
Bidart makes that wish, if not more intelligible, yet possessed of a fresh
power to test our pictures of human wish.
In "Proust on Skates" (included in
Flight Among the Tombs),
we see the
bedridden author, scandalously re-entering the public world, tracing grand
and fragile figures on the ice. "As usual, all alone," he
issues forth
Into the midst of strangers and his own
Interior debates.
