The last person I told was
a stranger. He had one too,
a gnarled thing with bruises
for eyes. He took it with him
on business trips, let it sleep at
the foot of every hotel bed
in Guangzhou. Plum wine & two
Percocets for breakfast, no lunch,
no dinner. When its teeth
got long, his second wife trimmed
them. What about you?
he asked. Who do you have?
No one, I told him. He still thinks
he was my first. I never had to tell
the real first. She could hear it in
my voice the way a catfish hears
the river singing for all the things
it’s drowned. You’re not slick,
she said. I see you with your plateful
of bones, kneeling by the water
like a saint. You’re not a saint.
You’re starving. Listen to me,
baby boy. Stop feeding that thing.
What surprised you about the composition of this poem?
In the early drafting process for “Companion,” I’d rendered the little question and answer moment at its center (beginning with “What about you?”) as reported speech—something along the lines of, “He asked me who I had. / I told him I had no one.” I was hesitant then to deploy actual dialogue in the poem, in any poem. I didn’t want to incorporate elements that felt to me too narrative, too borrowed, perhaps, from fiction, but once I overcame this barrier and rewrote the lines as dialogue, I found myself excited by the possibilities of voices beyond my speaker’s, freed suddenly from limitations I hadn’t even realized were there. For the last few lines, I gave the reins to a third voice, that of the “real first.” I’m pleased with where it took me.