Frank Bidart’s “Hunger for the Absolute” was featured as one of the Dish’s “Poems from the Year” in December, when we looked back at some our favorite poems that we ran in 2013. This weekend we’re again celebrating Bidart’s work, with two poems from his latest collection, Metaphysical Dog, which will be published in a paperback edition this spring by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Here is “For the AIDS Dead”:

The plague you have thus far survived. They didn’t.
Nothing that they did in bed that you didn’t.

Writing a poem, I cleave to “you.” You
means I, one, you, as well as the you

inside you constantly talk to. Without
justice or logic, without

sense, you survived. They didn’t.
Nothing that they did in bed that you didn’t.

(From Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart © 2013 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by kind permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Photo of the AIDS quilt from the National Institutes of Health, via Wikimedia Commons)