Frank Bidart
If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove
It is what recurs that we believe,
your face not at one moment looking
sideways up at me anguished or
elate, but the old words welling up by
gravity rearranged:
two weeks before you died in
pain worn out, after my usual casual sign-off
with All my love, your simple
solemn My love to you, Frank.
Frank Bidart, In the Western Night: Collected
Poems 1965-1990, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991.