This poem is called "Saying Your Names."
Chemical names.
Bird names.
Names of fire and flame and stone.
Paint names.
Delicate names like bones in the body.
Rumpelstiltskin names that are always changing.
Names that no one's ever able to figure out.
Names of spells and names hexes.
Names cursed quietly under the breath
or called out loudly to fill the yard, calling you inside again,
calling you home.
Nicknames and pet names and Baroque French monikers
written in shorthand, written in longhand,
scrawled allegedly in brown ink on the backs of photographs
or embossed on envelopes lined with gold.
Names called out across the water.
Names I called you behind your back, sour and delicious,
secret and unrepeatable.
The names of flowers that open only once,
shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops,
or muffled by pillows or whispered in sleep
or caught in the throat like a lump of meat.
I try, I do.
I try and try.
A happy ending, sure enough.
Hello, Darling, welcome home.
I'll call you Darling, hold you tight,
we are not traitors when the lights go out.
It's dark.
Sweetheart, is that you?
There are no tears, no pictures of him squarely.
A sea sign framed in glass and boats,
those little boats with sails aflutter,
shining lights upon the water, lights that splinter one
the end of the pier.
His voice on tape, his name on the envelope.
The soft sound of a body falling off a bridge behind you.
The body hardly even makes a sound.
The waters of dead, the clear road,
every lover in the form of stars, the road blocked.
All night I stretch my arms across rivers of blood,
the dark woods, singing with all my skin and bone,
please keep him safe.
Let him play his head on my chest
and we will be like sailors, swimming in the sound of it,
dashed to pieces.
Makes a cathedral, him pressing against me,
his lips at my neck, and yes, I do believe his mouth
is heaven, his kisses falling over me like stars.
Names of heat and names of light,
themes of collision in the dark, on the side of the bus,
in the bark of the tree, in ballpoint pen on jeans
and hands and the backs of matchbooks that then get lost.
Names like pain cries, names like tombstones,
names forgotten and reinvented, names forbidden or overused.
Your name, like a song, I sing to myself.
Your name, like a box where I keep my love.
Your name, like a nest in the tree of love.
Your name, like a boat in the sea of love.
Oh, now we're in the sea of love!
Your name like detergent in the washing machine.
Your name like two Xs, like punched- in eyes,
like a drunk cartoon passed out in the gutter.
Your name with two Xs to mark the spots, to hold the place,
to keep the treasure from becoming ever lost.
I'm saying your name of the grocery store.
I'm saying your name on the bridge at dawn.
Your name like an animal covered with frost.
Your name like a music that's been transposed.
A suit of fur, a coat of mud, a kick in the pants,
a lung full of glass, the sails in the wind, and the slap
of waves, and the hull of a boat that's
sinking, to the sound of mermaids singing songs of love
in the tub of a simple, profound sadness when it sounds so far
away.
Here is a map with your name for a capital.
Here is an arrow to prove a point.
We laugh and it pits the world against us.
We laugh and we've got nothing left to lose.
I came to tell you we'll swim in the water.
We'll swim like something sparkling underneath the glass,
our bodies shivering and the sound of our breathing
and the shore so far away.
I use my body like a ladder, climbing
to the thing behind it, saying farewell to flesh,
farewell to everything caught underfoot and flattened.
Names of poisons.
Names of handguns.
Names of places we've been together.
Names of people we'd be together.
Names of endurance.
Names of devotion.
Street names and place names and all the names
of our dark heaven crackling in their pan.
It's a bed of straw, darling.
It sure as shit is.
If there was one thing I could save from the fire, he said,
the broken arms of the sycamore, the eucalyptus still trying
to climb out of the yard, your breath on my neck
like the music that holds my hands down,
kisses as they burn their way across my spine or rain,
our bodies wet, clothes clinging arm to elbow,
clothes clinging nipple to groin.
I'll be right here.
I'm waiting.
Say hallelujah.
Say good night.
Say it over the canned music and your feet won't stumble.
His face getting larger, the rest wearing on every side.
And angels, about 12 angels, angels knocking on your head
right now.
Hello, hello.
A flash in the sky.
Would you like to meet him there in heaven?
Imagine a room.
A sudden glow.
Here is my hand, my heart, my throat, my wrist.
Here are the illuminated cities at the center of me.
And here is the center of me, which
is a lake, which is a well that we can drink from.
But I can't go through with it.
I just don't want to die anymore.