The names of the dead
are messages on black marble
and plunge into the earth
They are the notes
of a war
we imagined forgetting
One wrong move
and what remains is how
things began: the naming: the linear
a code: "Vietnam Veteran"
Names find light to circle
the trapping
sponges of involuntary grass.
It is 1:00 AM in Washington
a cursory wind version of October
keeps finding
Kennedy's flame
enlarging and reducing
as if his part of the world
is trying to rise
to the reluctant surface
of a lake
I am thinking of the names for water.
I am floating into the next
morning of another life
into a white and burgeoning sun
rising behind a sobering capitol
unshakable as any other building
that forms the hinge
of this drying Atlantis
The names of the AIDS dead
struggle through a hardening
sound system and land
like brass phoenixes in snow
I cannot remember the names
of the living
until I have left out
the names of the dead
We are all made of
our own people
laying names on the ground
like men unfurling the
video flag on the moon
I am thinking of the names for earth.
Michael, I know what you mean
when you say a name
signals a whole neighborhood,
a family, a system of stars
what gets left to us
this morning
is the serial reverberation
of names wanting to stay
of wanting to name something
I notice
how each panel of each name
enters my head
like the staccoto
report from a full magazine.
I am thinking of the names for fire.
The day tries to keep ending.
When I think of one name I remember
another.
When I watch men of this city
dancing away the diagnosis: alone until
gratified
I try not to see them
with names
I try to see them
as intentions of light
I try hearing them as sounds
I cannot bear having to remember
them: their names
I am moving toward the marble dance floor
I am falling away
I am the names for my own dying
I am thinking of names for air.