Nobody stays new for long, and Dave Bonta's poem seems to know it. "First timers" begins by promising a pure beginning and then fills it with disguises, fragile vehicles and a lot of talk. By the end, the first time turns out to be a kind of relearning, and the poem's one stated motive for it is hope.
The opening couplet sets the terms: "the first time is a small / but needful dominion." The line break slows the reader down. "Small" stands alone for a moment before "but needful" qualifies it. "Dominion" is a grand, kingly word, so the phrase lets us feel the scale of a first experience, tiny to everyone else but a whole territory to the person in it. The images that follow work like furnishings for that territory. There is "a boat of unfortunate paper," which sinks before it is launched, and the word "unfortunate" gives the boat a fate before it has a voyage. Then comes "an ink that occasions silence." The verb is formal and almost bureaucratic, which sits oddly beside the paper boat, and the idea is a paradox: writing, which looks like speech, produces quiet.
The third image is the most theatrical: "a man who escaped prison / in woman's apparel." Escape by disguise is another makeshift vessel, like the paper boat. The poem seems to say that freedom, or at least a first taste of it, often arrives in a costume that isn't yours. The poem doesn't say what the prison is, and leaving that open lets the image apply to nearly any beginning.
Then the poem changes. Up to this point everything is an impersonal noun phrase: "a boat," "an ink," "a man." Verbs and pronouns arrive together, and with them the people. "You crow like a cock / at the table of it" is comic and slightly deflating. A rooster is the creature of dawn, so crowing suits a beginning, but it is also loud, vain and repetitive. "The table of it" is pleasingly slippery. It could be a dinner table, a writing desk or a bargaining table. The judging by imagery suggests a boaster, but who "you" is, whether another person or the speaker's own younger self, the poem never says.
The answering line is "and I am summoned like an answer / in words words words." The triple "words" is Hamlet's reply when Polonius asks what he is reading, and whether or not Bonta intends the echo, it is hard to miss. In Hamlet's mouth the phrase is an evasion, language used as a shrug. Here it does something similar to the sound of the line. Three stressed syllables pile up, the rhythm goes flat, and the word starts to lose its meaning, as any word does when repeated. The speaker is "summoned like an answer," called into being by someone else's question or boast. Even the first-person voice arrives second.
The form supports this. The poem is six unrhymed couplets, with no capital letters and no punctuation at all, so nothing is officially started or finished. The lines are short and mostly free of any fixed meter, and there is no rhyme to tie them off, which suits a poem about things that are not tidy. The last couplet is the one that turns the whole poem around: "I learn old things all over again / out of hope." "All over again" can mean thoroughly or repeatedly, and both fit. "Out of hope" is ambiguous in a useful way. It can mean motivated by hope, but it can also sound like "out of" in "out of money," as though hope were what has run out. The poem lets both readings stand, and the soft ending lands somewhere between consolation and fatigue.
The title is plural, "First timers," so the poem is not about one special moment but about everyone who has ever begun anything, and that is where its significance lies. It refuses the usual story that firsts are fresh and original. In Bonta's version, a beginning is made from recycled material: paper, disguise, a line from Hamlet, old lessons. The poem suggests this is not a failure. The smallness is still "needful," and hope is still what gets people to do the learning again.