REGINALD SHEPHERD's "You, Therefore" has an unforgettable first line, that rare thing in contemporary poetry: “You are like me, you will die too, but not today.” In fact, Shepherd’s poem is an abundance of dope lines that have been in my head for years. I say: "Home is nowhere, therefore you, / a kind of dwell and welcome" and think of my woman. I say: “words spill from your mouth in waves” and think of myself. And then I think of Robert Philen, and how Shepherd’s love for him inspired a poem that has given me a way to understand what I want to say to my wife, a way to recognize what I want my wife to say to me.
“You, Therefore” is a masterpiece, because it allows us to do with it what we should be able to do with all great poems: recite them to our loves as if they were our own and know they express something we are always, only, moving towards.
Reginald Shepherd, “You, Therefore”
You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:
and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
when there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name [more Valentine's Day poems]
LARB Contributor
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a husband and father of two sons. The author of the memoir, A Question of Freedom (Avery/Penguin 2009) and the collection of poetry, Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), Betts has been awarded fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the Open Society Institute, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and Warren Wilson College. As a poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society.
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