Diary Entry:
wintertime, 1991
after Rick Powers
for Mike

Joe Amato

Searching for a new algorithm, maybe
a new technology, even
a new god. I feel acutely now
the line that broke
down a year ago in a fortnight, suddenly
and finally leaving my younger brother and me with
each other. There were other significations
naturally, but our shared idiom was
and is most vital, between us
it's never been a matter
of chromosomes, but of
meanings: we laugh at the same jokes
same old same old.

And what is emerging is again too complex
to be called a "relationship," too structured
to be anything less. The resolution is partial
and timely, owing more to free association
than to hierarchy, affiliation
becoming the urgent and generous need
to fabricate new patterns, new parses, their climaxes
or perturbations. It's nothing less
than a new way to love, yes, again
that four letter word, like life, by subtraction from
and mysterious accretion to
language:

"look only very even"

The syntax in us all may in fact be of measures
jointly underwritten, but to write oneself
as a function of another is less
a matter of fact, of primal call
to reveal latent or sensible genealogies, than
a move away
from mere prefiguration, a sometimes supple
and counterbalanced dance:

Together, we happen upon each other
between words and dreams
a phrase apart from where we thought
we both might have been.

 
Joe Amato teaches in the English Department at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.