Frank Bidart's Ironic Poem

Edith Piaf and a friend


The Soldier Who Guards The Frontier

On the surface of the earth
despite all effort I continued
the life I had led in its depths.

So when you said cuckoo
hello and my heart
leapt up imagine my surprise.

From the depths some mouth
drawn by your refusals of love
fastened on them and fattened.

It's 2004; now the creature
born of our union in 1983
attains maturity.

He guards the frontier.
As he guards the frontier he listens
all day to the records of Edith Piaf.

Heroic risk, Piaf sings. Love
is heroic risk, for what you are impelled
to risk but do not

kills you; as does, of course this voice
knows, risk. He is addicted
to the records of Edith Piaf.

He lives on the aroma, the intoxications
of what he has been spared.
He is grateful, he says, not to exist.


It is ironic that some are willing to risk their lives, but not their heart, because loving deeply is perceived as a greater risk than a bullet or a bomb. Yes, love has the potential to kill the spirit -- even the flesh, as I know well. Some hide from life in the most dangerous of physical pursuits i.e., combative front lines. Some view these as less risky than loving another deeply. I suppose were it not so, poetry might be less popular -- and Edith Piaf's voice. I think divorce made me more passionate about love; more optimistic, as the young can be, about life. Of course, I know that no matter what my environment would have been, I have no choice but to be flesh and blood - in the best sense.