NAMING
1

The window frames a blue pause in the run of winter: clear sky, the snow embossed with faint outlines (buried branches, rock tips)

Before your eyes, falling: the domino line of centuries, time sweeping backward to the antediluvian world, the cave in winter

Here, under your blanket of tumultuous hair, you are animal woman urge incarnate

the child that gasps first breath between your thighs is unnamed and ageless, body of your body

Already, death blooms within hi certain Bower

Safety lies
in not knowing this

2

When you return from the edge of yourself to your own time, the warm woodglow of the sideboard, the cats dreaming cat dreams, your son, five months old, is cooing his marvel at the plastic rabbit in his hands

This is the familiar life, the comfortable evolution

The lines around your eyes grow stealthily more pronounced, your hair grays

The days are more and more a recognition of these and other things, all carefully sounded like the child's proud verbal pointing: apple bubble face

Names occupy the world with the assurance of buddhas, meaningful and placid, each a soothing roundness complete in itself, each word a hologram, in each the world recreated

You summon it now, your son's name, that small melody

Brendan, you say, and know that in the saying of a name is born the first danger

Eva Tihanyi
Ontario