For the Twentieth Century
Frank Bidart, 1939

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.