by Debbie Vance
The Missouri Review featured this poem by Corrie Williamson a couple of weeks ago, and I find that I keep returning to it. It revolves around one moment-which Carrie speaks of in the following author’s note-but includes so many more. Tangible memories of youth, of wheat fields and worried mothers and bells that bring you home, of speechless animals and magic ships in the night, and of butter. There’s a beautiful connection here, between memory and language, love and imagination, knowing and naming. It’s a poem I’d like to spend more time with, to dwell with. I hope you do, too.
Rather unromantically, this poem emerged from laying awake and listening to my boyfriend snore. Perhaps a bit more romantically, let me quote Emerson on etymology and naming: “Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree.” With this poem, I wanted to take simple words and sounds and trace a kind of dreamlike arc towards their historical or emotional hearts, to note both the beauty and the challenge of naming something. It’s a love poem to a physical person, as well as to the process of finding other ways of imagining love. It is also, I’ve always thought, a lullaby – a song to rock the boat of the self to sleep.
Love Poem for Naming
by Corrie Williamson
Find the word for it, the nightly sound
of breath
beside me. Call it a hand
run up and down a length
of taut-skinned tree bark,
poplar, maybe.
Arrowed shape
the old shipmakers
harvested for masts.
Or possibly call it the rustle in the dry
wheat that grew wild through
our back field,
where I built nests when I was small
as I imagined the speechless animals
did, flag leaves
brittle, shush-saying over my head.
Hidden there
just long enough
for my mother to worry. Come to the porch,
dishtowel on her shoulder,
casting
my name over the afternoon.
Keen and honest
as the iron
bell in the garden. I would
explode from the chaff,
grassy-haired,
a wild grouse. Most nights:
his back.
The moon
turns its white face between the blinds.
If I woke him,
demanded, The moon,
name it, would he say
a bowl of gold butter
on our breakfast table.
The upended shell of earth’s silver
turtle twin. No,
I’d reply.
An ivory viking longship, tipping
into black sea. Your shoulder
blades’
parenthetical. No, this: your body
is the boat, its fine,
slumbered rigging -
that drumming in the keel.
Tags: poetry