The Names

I wrote this poem in 1990 or so. It just all came out at once and has changed very little since then. I had read the introduction to Fernand Braudel’s The Identity of France. In that introduction he cites a French proverb that the soil is planted with peasants. And then he estimates how many people have lived in France since human occupation began. He says the very soil of the vineyards and land of France is composed of the bodies of the millions of people who lived there. This led me to think about World War 1. Dead soldiers buried in the walls of trenches would fall out as the soil thawed. And then I thought of my first daughter, Elizabeth. When her mother was 4 or 5 months pregnant she had a sudden hemorrhage and we thought we might lose the baby. She was born in the midst of a huge thunderstorm. When we examined the placenta, there was a hole in it. The midwife said that might have been a cause of the bleeding. Either that or she had kicked a hole in it. I think the latter is most likely, given how she is, a child (well, woman now) after my own temperament. Anyway, the poem seems to me to be about War, and love, the concrete versus abstraction, and love. I suppose that’s what they’re all about.

The Names

 

Everywhere the names are spoken

as if this door between us were unpainted,

hollow, cheap.  The mud spotted boots of dead soldiers

are twisted off and turned around stiff laces.

The names behind the door are petals

fallen on the fields, bodies forked into soil.

Their breath, even as it curses going down,

stays sweet on starlight,

sees it shining out of stumps and branches,

etched in acid on a dented sky of pink and matchstick.

 

Is it the one big name then for all the little

nouns were they?  who clambered up the slide

and asked, “What’s that?”

when she said, “Black telephones are perfect,”

holding up the cradle to her ear.

I knew it by the picture and the name then:

still before geraniums and snap dragons in the sun

she watched yellow moths hit on the stamens.

 

All my days are full of names

as if a million ever breathed

a second more specific than you did

the day the blood burst out.

Then later when we made a name

and helped the balled fists bloom

we gave her mouth both milk and meaning.