The Task of Naming Me

I don’t think the task of naming me

fell to my father because they thought

the sex of the child was decided by the sperm—

I don’t think they knew that. They thought that giving

a name was a big deal, so it should be

a man who did it—and my mother was grieving,

her Father in heaven had given her

another daughter. In the room where new parents

pay and check out, they won’t let you take

your baby home if you haven’t named her.

I think there would have been a flourish,

a flash for the nurses in his dark brown eyes,

a delay as he closed his eyes and held his

frat-boy finger above the open

Bible, then brought his digit down into the

creek-bed of eros, the laid-open

lady book, and touched my name.

This morning I wondered if it was on purpose

he opened the book way back in war,

in Kings and Numbers, letting the Psalms

and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes go by,

good-bye to Isaiah and Jeremiah,

and stopped, blind, at the narrow window

of a song—the slot for the crossbow’s arrow

between turret bulges—he touched my name among

the roses and the lilies, I rose up

under my father’s thumb, and his fruit was

sweet to my taste, and the shade of his presence

has been all my life a rich and enduring night.