"I left my wife for a dictionary." Dave Bonta delivers the line deadpan, like a man reporting a perfectly sensible decision. The sentence is plain and complete, and nothing else in "Lexophile" will be so orderly again. The title, which means a lover of words, gives the joke away. The affair is real, and the other party is language itself.
The second line makes the rival vivid: the dictionary "spoke as 1000 strangers to me." A dictionary is not one voice but a crowd, and the speaker has swapped the one person he knew for a thousand he doesn't. The numeral is also a small irony. In a poem about words, "1000" is a figure rather than a word, as if even here something refuses to be spelled out. The word "strangers" carries the appeal. A marriage means long familiarity, while a dictionary offers endless unfamiliarity.
From there the syntax begins to give way. "And if I saw hand and hatch / I saw harpsicon" starts like a conditional but never delivers a conclusion. It slides from one word to the next. The h-words cluster close together, and the way they bunch suggests a finger moving down a page, though that is an inference from the text rather than anything the poem states. "Harpsicon" looks like a variant of "harpsichord" with "icon" tucked inside it. Reading by sound and spelling, the speaker no longer sees things, only their word-shapes, and the shapes drift into one another.
The next run is "a bargain, / a batten, a bed." The repeated "a" makes each word sound like a dictionary headword, and the b-alliteration holds them together. The sequence also reads as a miniature of domestic life. A bargain is a deal, a batten is something that fastens, and a bed is where it all ends up. The marriage seems to have been rebuilt from loose vocabulary, with the structure left and the person gone.
The line breaks do the most pointed work. "A bed where / I please my / self" cuts "myself" in half, so that "self" stands alone as if it were another entry on the page. The bed is still there, but what happens in it is now solitary, and the self is pleasing itself with no partner to answer. A dictionary can supply endless words but cannot reply to the speaker. The last line, "self, strength, segnora…", keeps up the s-alliteration. "Segnora" resembles the Italian and Spanish words for a married woman or lady, though the spelling is off. If we read it that way, the wife returns at the very end as a foreign word, a stranger among strangers. The poem doesn't say so, but the possibility makes the ending sadder than the opening joke prepared us for.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines start long and confident, then break into fragments of one or two beats, and the rhythm stutters as the grammar loosens. Repeated consonants (h, b, s) stand in for rhyme, pulling the words together by sound rather than by sense. The closing ellipsis matters too. The poem has no full stop because a dictionary has no natural last page, and the speaker is still reading.
"Lexophile" is significant because it turns a stock situation, the man who leaves his wife for something else, into a comic and slightly eerie portrait of obsession. The humor is real, since the reader first grins at the premise. But the poem then acts out what the obsession does to a mind, loosening words from meaning until they are only sounds and spellings. It leaves the reader to decide whether the speaker has gained a thousand voices or lost the one that mattered.