Frank Bidart

For the Twentieth Century

Bound,  hungry to pluck again from the thousand
technologies of ecstasy
 
boundlessness,  the world that at a drop of water
rises without boundaries,
 
I push the PLAY button:—
 
...Callas, Laurel & Hardy, Szigeti
 
you are alive again,—
 
the slow movement of K.218
once again no longer
 
bland, merely pretty, nearly
banal, as it is
 
in all but Szigeti’s hands
 
           *
Therefore you and I and Mozart
must thank the Twentieth Century,  for
 
it made you pattern,  form
whose infinite
 
repeatability within matter
defies matter—
 
Malibran. Henry Irving. The young
Joachim. They are lost, a mountain of
 
newspaper clippings,  become words
not their own words. The art of the performer.
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