Poetry Response #8, "If See No End In Is"

Bidart brings words to the repeating reel in my mind, personifying my thoughts, my cares, my worries. “If See No End In is” is the splatter paint design of poems. Everything is separate, but when put together, the colors form a rainbow, a connection to the viewers and each person draws an image on the canvas of what the artist was trying to evoke. Each stanza in Frank Bidart’s sestina strokes my memories, calling them back. The way that smell enhances recollection, Bidart’s words stand out, pinpointing a memory of my own. What I love about his poem is the stumbling he does, first taking one side of an argument, then supporting the other. He warns of us looking back on life and our experiences, implying that each is not new, but just an extension of one before it, and the one before that, just like that one time in the sixth grade, which seemed an awful lot like that incident in kindergarten. Since it happened three times before, luckily you knew the best way to respond the last time, the final time you ever set yourself in that trap. But the knowledge you handled the situation with was limited to only your experience of it and the resolutions you heard from your friends and coworkers and nagging, aging mother. Everyone has their own way of confronting problems and mistakes, and soon you ignore one friend’s advice because it doesn’t mesh with what your heart is telling you, so you go to another. She is your more like-minded friend who will tell what you want to hear. Soon, she becomes your confidant and the other friend forgotten, only reached out when you need a shopping buddy, but never one to lay out your heart to. Bidart uses “plateau” to include all general memories; a fitting visual since most plateaus look alike in every desert, every rocky national park. The same shape, but varying heights, only characterized by their locations and who joined us on that vacation.
He predicts our ignorance. Oh, you may have fallen in love before and then broken up, mending your heart with Choco Chunk ice cream and sappy romance movies from the 80’s; or you may run to the edge of town and back, following the same old loop you take every time a girl breaks your heart. But without this one, you will emotionally perish. This girl is the one who showed you the light; this guy was the only to make you feel like a queen; you’ll never find anyone better! His tone is decidedly pessimistic, lending the readers the idea that nothing in life will last and memories don’t matter—that Vacation of a Lifetime at Disney World will flit away as soon as your teenage daughter discovers the atmosphere of long nights and shirtless boys in Destin; those RV trips across the country only make your kid cringe at the sight of motorhome through his twenties. Everything is fleeting so don’t invest too much. But love… love is where is your heart soars: the highest of highs and lowest of lows! It is better to have love and lost than to have never loved at all! Love makes the world go round! And then, you break up. He dies. She finds someone better. You’re alone again, and may never find anyone else.
But then, hope: “Something in you believes that it is not the end.” You can’t see where your future is headed, but it’s filled with tests and college and dates and jobs and babies and houses with white picket fences. But you don’t know when it will come, and the agony of waiting and wondering is brutal. It kills me—patience is not my virtue. And Bidart realizes this downfall in humanity, who wants quick cures and immediate answers: “What none knows is when, not if.”