The Enterprise is Abandoned by Frank Bidart

 The Enterprise is Abandoned

 

I ’m not a fool, I knew from the beginning

what couldn’t happen. What couldn’t happen

didn’t. The enterprise is abandoned.

But half our life is

dreams, delirium, everything that underlies

that feeds

that keeps alive the illusion of sanity, semi-

sanity, we allow

others to see. The half of me that feeds the rest

is in mourning. Mourns. Each time we must

mourn, we fear this is the final mourning, this time

mourning never will lift. A friend said when a lover

dies, it takes

two years. Then it lifts.

Inside those two years, you punish

not only the world,

but yourself.

At seventy-two, the future is what I mourn.

Since college I’ve never forgotten Masha

in The Seagull saying I am in mourning for my life.

She wears only black, she treats others with

fierce solicitude

and sudden punishment.

The enterprise is abandoned. And not.