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.
