“Martha Yarnoz Bidart Hall” by Frank Bidart:
Though she whom you had so let
in, the desire for survival will notallow you ever to admit
another so deeply in againThough she, in, went crazy
vengeful-crazyso that, as in Dante, there she ate your heart
Though her house that she despised but
spent her life constructingstill cannot, thirty-nine years after
her death, by your ratiocination or ragebe uncon-
structedyou think, We had an encounter on the earth
each of us
hungry beyond beliefAs long as you are alive
she is aliveYou are the leaping
dogcapricious on the grass, lunging
at something only it can see.
(From Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart © 2013 by Frank Bidart. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Photo by Joshua Veitch-Michaelis)