Making a Name

Art by Mark Hurtubise

by Caleb Braun

            I want to get started! I want to cut down the cedar
            and make for myself an everlasting name.
            Gilgamesh, Tablet II: Enkidu was sitting, 159-160

For weeks now, scattered thunder, flooded plains,
dry soil shepherding the water still, above.

Puddles, make-shift lakes: zeros without a figure.

What would they call me if this shoddy house collapsed
and I undone by summer storms?

A scribbler in a rented room. Poor Jackself
all athirst in wet. He who kept the question

in the air as a ball is bandied
between two tight rackets—

the occasional backhand, the rare knock
out of the park. The weather kept

the workers in. No dog passed
this window for days. Man no more than this?

I repeat, I repeat, I babble crooked words
as they catch inside my crooks and cavernous

as the moon, this cold night could turn us
all to fools. Off! Off! you lendings. I’ve my own

voice to say for myself my everlasting shame.
The wind seeps, the page turns

and the power’s out—I can’t see myself
to lay my words alone. My mouth opens

like a fragmented tablet, silent like a donkey
waiting to be struck with speech.

Whether to walk in light to an imagined Indiana
or stay at this window, apprehensive

for the newspaper boys’ dismissive toss,
the poem is merely negotiation

between two extremes. Starts
and stops. Night and day. The given

and the as yet to be made. Sincerity,
which is the best form of parody,

parody, which is the sincerest flattery.

The wind’s yaw yaw,
the seesaw’s laugh with no riders.

In parody I recall the conditions of my survival:

madman raving in the hurricane like a tattered flag;
Mom and Dad whose voices fucked me up;

every word that almost tells my name;
the gods who left me alone with the electric drone

of the whippoorwill in wind,
in the flooded field, in the thunder’s echo,

in the mind that made God happen to the mind.

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