"Elephants in the Fall" for Micah and Miles.
"I. Micah Michael Zamir Betts.
November's flame in that year of hard sunsets, of winter's
plangency and days when my insomnia courted cognac.
All our thoughts were beginnings,
and you became the roundness that grew to a moon
above your mother's hips.
We waited without a name for your wonder and three days
after your birth twice named you for the uncle you'll never
meet.
The names questions, Micah, who resembles God.
Michael, who reminds us of who has gone too soon.
And we pronounced Micah as we wanted--
Mekhi, because like the kid from Clockers ,
we scrape fists and cuffs for the dreams of you.
And now, when on most days your body is all blur and bustle--
our song is how right we got it, when the light from that moon
spilled out of your mother's belly, I tell you,
you were smiling then, as if you knew
you were the first song that found me worthy.
II.
Miles Thelonious Betts.
Named after the trumpet, after the sound that
comes from all the hurt and want that leads a man
to turn his back to the world.
We named you after Monk, too, because sometimes you
have to stack legends in a single body already big,
enough for the sound of them, and we imagined
that you gave us a different tune, a way to bang keys
into each other until our lives filled with unexpected music.
I hear you call me daddy in this land
where my father's name is sometimes
another word for grave, and I almost pause.
It's the song that wants to unravel me.
More crow than swan, I've always been so much cage and caged in.
And all that changes when we square
the M. This old riff on a shotgun marriage
calls as a back, your mother's hand in mine and the shotgun
is what we aim at the world that threatens,
and I scoop you in my arms, and you are calling us.
Again."