Because You Have a Poem in Your Book Addressed to “You”

and then the “you” wrote a poem in response, I wanted to write
you (the real you) a poem about the person you praise
in your book’s very last poem—the mentor who seemed
perfectly in control of his life in a way you sense you may
never be in control of your own. Your homage bestows
gratitude and admiration. And forgive me sketching this out
on the blank pages at the end of your book because I am
on the C train with no other paper, and I have to hope those end-
pages lie in wait, should they be called upon, to house a
poem kindly to the author of the book. And I don’t mean to
crash your praise for this poet who was, decades earlier than
he was yours, also my teacher, and I’ll say in his defense, or
really anybody’s, that we have many selves, and these facets
allow us to be different people to different people, and
that’s the good part, and might imply that I, too, could
possibly redeem myself in one relationship for the casualties
I inflicted in another. Maybe even for this poem! Is it
mean-spirited, wanting to convey how, as a younger man—
without doing the math who knows maybe even the age
you are now because when we are students, the older people
seem an age we will never arrive—is it mean-spirited to tell you
the man to whom you compare yourself so unfavorably—
even if with considered self-acceptance of that contrast—
by all accounts and actually even as a matter of public record
was himself considered a vain, egomaniacal philanderer? And,
to top it off, himself mean-spirited to students for whom he
had no use, although they (by which I mean we) in order to
study with him had relocated to an awful city, where we found
no provisions had been made for us? I’m telling you this
for two reasons: The poem’s speaker (ha ha) allows that his
soul, at the time of writing the poem, still went ricocheting
like a marble in a cake tin (I’m paraphrasing) but I’m here
to tell you that the far-off self-possession the poem’s subject
presented was more likely a result of him being cross-tethered
17 ways to those he had made dependent on him and who,
I would bet, held him in place. I guess it might be possible he
became a better person by the time he was so good to you.
A self-serving thought no doubt because it infers I might
be able to be a better person at some point! So I’ll forget
the second reason. I’ll just tell you he was an old goat even
when he was much younger and only a few of his poems
exist in beauty for me, the rest are intellectual come-ons and
self-grooming, and, sure, everyone likes his book about the
great poet of yore, but you are already, where you are in life
and work, authentic the way the core of the earth is authentic
so your poems bloom even here, hurtling through the dark.

Read more from Issue 22.2.