atheoLogy of names

atheoLogy of names Brooke Stanish

do you bother yourself with the names of trees, or do you slip your sighs softly from their flailing heads? do you wonder as they pummel toward dirt what they might be called now disconnected from earth?

do you bother yourself with the names we give to the things we think we own— (a book under a bed, a rock on a desk, a finger on lips); do you call them by those names too?

did you give the saber-toothed sky her name, or did you leave it for us to find, seeping from a cave of alone we thought we’d crawled out from, beneath a pile of sticks we trace your name with?

do you pry open our chests with a name we heard in waking to that mother-hum of breakfast sighing scrambled eggs, young enough to eat buttered toast with cinnamon & without worry, old enough to wear your name on our wrists?

do the letters of our names mean anything to you, or does your breath curl over us, curving as spacetime, blowing our faces off as candles, erasing the names we’ve tried carving onto peeling, holey walls?

are you only a name we give to beauty’s stretching silence, this endless pause before the knowing?

perhaps Poetry 33