Why do poets write?

My wife, a psychiatrist, sleeps
through my reading and writing in bed,
the half-whispered lines,
manuscripts piled between us,but in the deep part of night
when her beeper sounds
she bolts awake to return the page
of a patient afraid he'll **** himself.She sits in her robe in the kitchen,
listening to the anguished voice
on the phone. She becomes
the vessel that contains his fear,someone he can trust to tell
things I would tell to a poem.