Frank Bidart’s new poem brings us back to that dance of self across time through the plural openings of eyes, mirrors, others. Meditative, obsessive, vulnerable, this poet’s signature traits remind us how much looking is still a live performance. Yet Bidart’s familiar imagery is sly and estranging. Where most of us, poets especially, inside the proverbial looking-glass might find only ourselves, Bidart’s art has always been about permitting other voices into the most intimate, if fleeting, interiors. Such looking surely has its erotic tension, but more essentially, “Old and Young” bets on the side of artistic scrupulousness. Glances pass, bodies age, but the poem is where we meet.
—Adam Fitzgerald, Poetry Editor
OLD AND YOUNG
If you have looked at someone in
a mirror
looking at you in the mirror
your eyes meeting
there
not face to face
*
backstage as you
prepare
for a performance
*
you look into the long horizontal
mirror
that backs the long theatrical
make-up table that runs along one
wall of the high dressing-room aerie
from which you must descend to the stage
*
there in the mirror you see
his eyes
looking into your eyes in the mirror
where you
plural
amused begin to talk
suddenly inspired not
to look at each other
directly but held by this third
thing as his eyes
allow your eyes to
follow his eyes in the mirror
you ask if anyone has ever
made a movie
in which two people talk not
directly to each other but during
the entire
static but dynamic
film as they go about their lives
their eyes are
locked staring at each other in a mirror
that they together hold a few feet
above them
or beside them
knowing if they look away
they will lose
what they now possess
trapped but freed
neither knowing
why this is better
why this
as long as no one enters
is release
because you are
twice
his age
THIS IS THE PLACE IN
NATURE
WE CAN MEET
space which
every other
space merely approximates
you ask again if
anybody made a movie
about this
*
others
enter loudly and when you
plural each look away you plural soon go on
