Love Poem for Naming
Find the word for it, the nightly sound
of breath
beside me. Call it a hand
run up and down a length
of taut-skinned tree bark,
poplar, maybe.
Arrowed shape
the old shipmakers
harvested for masts.
Or possibly call it the rustle in the dry
wheat that grew wild through
our back field,
where I built nests when I was small
as I imagined the speechless animals
did, flag leaves
brittle, shush-saying over my head.
Hidden there
just long enough
for my mother to worry. Come to the porch,
dishtowel on her shoulder,
casting
my name over the afternoon.
Keen and honest
as the iron
bell in the garden. I would
explode from the chaff,
grassy-haired,
a wild grouse. Most nights:
his back.
The moon
turns its white face between the blinds.
If I woke him,
demanded, The moon,
name it, would he say
a bowl of gold butter
on our breakfast table.
The upended shell of earth’s silver
turtle twin. No,
I’d reply.
An ivory viking longship, tipping
into black sea. Your shoulder
blades’
parenthetical. No, this: your body
is the boat, its fine,
slumbered rigging -
that drumming in the keel.
... by Corrie Williamson
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