BEHALF

This was the year everyone was saying I love
that for you, like no one could love on their own
behalf anymore, and I couldn’t decide if this
was an act of generosity or something more
disconcerting—the parasocial turning up
in actual social relations, as if we’d intuited
the need for collectivism but lacked any real
experience of solidarity. No models unless
you count all the ones we forgot to take
away from, and no one is doing the reading,
but we will keep up this vicarious feeling,
keep giving it all away, our love for one
another. And I know there’s something
to learn from catching language—maybe not
in the words themselves, but in the way it feels
to say aloud a thing you’ve seen only written,
the unstable chatter of novel form chugging
over smooth runners down your throat,
or the relief of a pin breaking through
the skin of an insect that may yet be alive.
Sometimes, it’s my father’s voice I find
picking a piece of mint, and I am familiar
only to my own history, and nothing will
ever quite conjure the timbre of what’s lost.
Aren’t we all just looking for new words
to grow old with, or old ones to make new
again? I don’t find my own argument
particularly convincing, but I still feel it,
articulated in my body, to be true. Someone
hands me the baby, says: I love that for you.