Frank Bidart

In Memory of Joe Brainard

the remnant of a vast, oceanic

bruise (wound delivered early and long ago)

was in you purity and 

sweetness self-gathered, CHOSEN

                                • 

When I tried to find words for the moral sense that unifies

and sweetens the country voices in your collage The Friendly Way,

you said It's a code.

You were a code

I yearned to decipher.—

In the end, the plague that full swift runs by

took you, broke you;—

                                           in the end, could not

                                           take you, did not break you—

you had somehow erased within you not only

meanness, but anger, the desire to punish

the universe for everything

not achieved, not tasted, seen again, touched—;

. . . the undecipherable

code unbroken even as the soul

learns once again the body it loves and hates is

made of earth, and will betray it.