the name descended when you came so I would be
able to give it to you
with all the lives in you,
without knowing what poems your head
knows by name, or namesake, or nickname,
above a rise of the churchyard
where I will utter your name.
You are the one on whose head that name
will hang, a name in which I am well pleased.
I know it won't be the same
as what the locket on your neck contains,
far from eyes but dangling near the heart
beyond any number of doubts that are in this place.
Because in mystery it comes, you see,
one length of time that separates
and then nothing, a meal that arrives
with all the grains of its salt in place,
hours before the first light born to dawn.
Its sound gnaws me today, this which will not be
a word by which you are designated,
but instead the sweat of love placed in you,
and more: the joy of naming you.
One wants to say: this will hurt, beware—
yet it must be done: I must excavate you to find you.
It will not be like pulling a dove out of a hat
to please the yelping crowd, but only that
I must pull all of you out of yourself by the root,
extract you like a tooth, hold you like a lens to the sky
in order that you may see why you have the right
to burn us with your name, wear it against the cold.
You shall be summoned by toil as by love
to a place that is reserved for people like you
who still have only a name to their name,
and you shall stand and walk through doors
that resist before you, knowing that only we
believe in the power of your name. And that
my child, is perhaps the main everything.

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