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Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Half-Light By Frank Bidart

That crazy drunken night I

maneuvered you out into a field outside of


Coachella - I’d never seen a sky

so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives


still were sprinkled with glistening

white shells from the ancient seabed


beneath us that receded long ago.

Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows.


- That suffocated, fearful

look on your face.


Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phone

tell me you died almost nine months ago.


Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitter

that we cannot ever have


the conversation that in

nature and alive we never had. Now not ever.


We have not spoken in years. I thought

perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two


broken-down old men, we wouldn’t

give a damn, and find speech.


When I tell you that all the years we were

undergraduates I was madly in love with you


you say you

knew. I say I knew you


knew. You say

There was no place in nature we could meet.


You say this as if you need me to

admit something. No place


in nature, given our natures. Or is this

warning? I say what is happening now is


happening only because one of us is

dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!


Our words

will be weirdly jolly.


That light I now envy

exists only on this page.