Naming

This time it’s a sliver of light, a headlight blooming blue through the bottom of the doorframe, bouncing off glass and catching on the starry brownness of my inner eyelid. The other night it was a yip, coyote probably, over near the singular prick of light down near the right hand corner of sharptop’s pyramid. I get up and bash around in the kitchen, gnawing on a banana and pouring myself half a glass of orange juice. Tonight I guess I’ll hang out with Thomas Merton in Alaska, resolving to keep a better journal myself, admiring the brisk energy of his wry hungry punches of haiku. When I was ten I couldn’t sleep one night and lay on the rollaway bed out on the screen porch, watching the horses’ shadows rub their shedding spring haunches against the gate, hearing the first tags of cricketvoice in the woods. Another time in winter I lay on the parquet floor of the living room and warmed into the pop of the melting logbark as the night’s fire died. I was sad and the blue window-triangle of constellations holding onto the big old ceiling beams up above me made me sadder. I pushed through the sorrow and named the pricks of star, lining them up into sunburned shoulders and deer rifles, fallen oak leaves and chimneys spumed with smoke, horses’ newly combed manes and the frayed edges of patchwork quilts. This has become a habit over the years when the puddle of blanket and pillow sends me into other rooms just to be in a different space. Sometimes I have the same formations of planet and distant sun in my head for years but then it feels like it’s time for something else. Right now I have an old rusted out hoe I found in a corner of a shed, a stray hound dog’s notched ear, the furl of a koi fin I saw in my father’s pond, the silhouette of the checkout lady at the Piggly Wiggly who also works at the elementary school caferia, and a teapot shaped like most of a diminishing moon. These trails and squares, spikes and circles, pentagrams and blips fall me asleep when I can’t get there alone. They have their stories, or sometimes just the start or the middle of a story. Seldom just the end. I let them hold onto my pettiness, the trembling earnest giddiness I find it hard to share, my still sometimes unutterable grief, my remorse, and my whispers. I won’t tell you the names behind the shapes. Make up your own where you see them. Listen for the sounds they need and meet them where they live.

--lks 2008