Prompt

They sat down together at the table
With phones and books and stacks of loose-leaf poems,
And for some reason they started reading

Like jigsaw-puzzle solvers start solving
By finding all the edges and corners
And heaping the featureless bits of sky,

Only what they were reading for was first
Instance of the first-person singular
In each poem. In other words, the first I.

Frequently, the first word was the first I.
Occasionally, it was buried deep.
More rarely, it didn’t appear at all.

When they were done, they gathered those phrases
And drew a third-person portrait from them.