DEAR MARK DOTY, ARE YOU THE MAN I MET 10 YEARS AGO?

A man and a man is likely to be counted as two men unless one of the men is Mark Doty
talking to the man in a hallway or in a convention center or the foyer to a busy hotel
where Mark Doty is staying
with men and adverbs reserved for men in a formal dining room.
Courteously. Magnificently. And manly
in the proximity of Mark Doty.
The definition of Mark Doty is intently,
like a man with other men attached to his body
talking about him in unison while the man he is talking with listens
and considers mathematics.
Is Mark Doty actually equal to a Mark Doty
or a star falling from the sky?
Is the star actually a satellite or Mark Doty or the sum total of men in a room
just thinking about themselves, the timbre in their voice,
the texture of the air while they’re speaking is a man’s texture,
something with and of and for and about and within and attached to a man talking
that makes me think of Mark Doty,
but that’s only because I met Mark Doty before and thought
that man right there is a man’s man with a man’s deep pockets
and a man’s voice that makes a man man up.

I would like to be friends with Mark Doty. So would every man who meets him.
I met Mark Doty at a reading
and there were men growing like little buds in the breast pocket of everyone in the audience.
There were men growing in awkward bodily regions.
And at the vent ducts there was a kind of Mark Doty sinuousness hiding just inside the vent.

This might explain the feeling I had afterwards. “It’s Mark Doty!”
What is a Mark Doty but a man more than a man making the men inside me
aspire to another man that sometimes I see growing out of my breast pocket,
my shoelaces and maybe some internal organ. But that’s for biology to explain.