--for Joseph Chaikin
It is to be without the staple references
-----of male heterosexual poets.
It is to be without a wife whose beauty and faithfulness
-----can be mentioned convivially to audiences at readings.
It is to be without a son whose discovery of the world
-----can be turned into a parable of the loss of innocence
-----that demonstrates our wonder and sorrow
It is to be without an exhaustive history of mistresses,
-----whose delicious parts can be listed as marks of our lustiness
-----or whose riddle can be claimed as the source of our pain.
It is to cut the ties of such familiar images,
to start again at the first cries of speech,
over and over, inventing our voices,
until our unheard-of testimony
transformed the understanding of reality irrevocably.
New language
in amazement
from this plain statement:
I am a man; you are a man; I love you.