“I Would Give Him a Name if I Knew He Wouldn’t Lose It”

This poem originally appeared in Poetry Quarterly in Spring 2014

after Jack Gilbert's "Tear It Down"

he once told me that the best way
to pronounce words like prendre
in French is to fake the accent, a twist
of the tongue, an extraction from what
is familiar, not so different, I imagine,
from the way he has pulled himself.
away from unworthy bars, lips from
what’s been spent out and can’t be
healed, ash to cobblestone like an
unspoken prayer, the kind only
the quiet can see unfolding. by
pretending to know where I have
gotten myself: this is the only way
to teach oneself how to live, like
thieves before they were given a title.
the French do not ask their questions
the same way we do and so we break
them down so that he can say
when do you get back? without
sounding like he meant to ask at all.
I think this as I walk King street alone,
everything smelling of mustard. In
some old poem, Keats gives directions
to oblivion, and so I think I have found
it in the hands that are not moving,
the few unhappenings of a southern
city named for a king that no longer
rules us or anyone, in the moving of
clouds like puppets strung to homebase
stars. and yet I still do not know him.
all I know to be true is that after our
meeting, he who means so little as of
now, I started to like the smell of
cigarettes, the sound of my own name.