#86 Kevin Brophy 'Naming'

W. H. Auden reported he was told

by a friend to take up poetry.

It seemed achievable and mysterious enough.

It was a bit like falling in love with

the name of a rock, like zircon

or uranium instead of wanting to know

the rock itself. It was a way of keeping

in mind that ‘the child hiding in the

shadow of a house with a lizard held

loosely in his soft left hand’ is not a

description of something, it is the

proper name of that child and the

name of my experience of meeting him

there. When I asked him his name

he searched his memory and his

vocabulary, and looked down at the

lizard moving on his palm, and at his young

brother whispering into his chest,

and said, eventually, Dylan. Do you

live here, I asked him, or are you

visiting. Live here, he said. Do you

want to come to school, I asked him.

He looked at the lizard again, his brother

whispered up at him again, he looked

around at the grass, the shadows, the

desert beyond us and almost said yes.

His brother pointed to another pale

sightless looking creature in the grass

and they went away. Names float away

here as easily as days.