Naming

Spit from pink and thickly glazed,
we, first, are named.
What, then, of the naming of the world?
In the beginning, perhaps we played parents—
cradling this thing, as if seeing it for the first time,
our eyes gone soft, cooing “Rock”
as we raise it up to the sun.
Or perhaps the names found us—
a man hurls one at another man’s head,
the first murder
over the stolen carcass of a felled mammal,
and tearful witnesses grope to shout the crime
into the open world,
the name “Rock” bursting out, instinctual:
the tough, blunt K
like the sound of stone against bone.
There is a rock, and there is a rock
covered in the blood of another,
just as there is the name John, and then there is John
after you have loved one.
That static sound of the J
like ocean surf, or an untuned radio.
You have named him, again, but freshly.
But the world was not born to us—
we were born to it,
and if you lie in the grass, your ear to the ground,
you can hear the world whisper the name
it gave us long ago,
back when we were born,
back when the first man stood in the woods
to carve into the bark.

— 2013