Take Care
Take Care
For Mila Aletheia
Nobody is born
from Aletheia but some
are born into her songs of longing
apopheniacs who draw the sky indoors
who draw the night
You are not
though soon you will be
someone's daughter
Brought out of the mud and brandished
like a stringed thing a piano key
for an eyelid a voice
unleashed onto the hour of images
the first epistle of one arriving
from among the many departed
Take care of your name
Take care of your name and know
that while apophenia is to impose
meaning onto meaninglessness
there is irony in twentieth-century terms
coined by nazi neurologists running
hospitals where there is no coincidence
in words preceding patients
a good doctor
could always use more of
Take care of your name
Take care
Of the one I loved and in love kept
for when the time might come
Take care of your name
when you hear it called
Into the place of reaching
and forgetting nothing
of the slowly said thing
take care to remember
what it was
To remember what it was
you must take care of the name
you must
take note of the movement
Of the name into your house like feet
into socks the movement
of new shapes shaping
the lake behind your ears
its hum take note
Of the movement of your mother's care
the way she rocks and tips
and stretches her neck
out to where her face meets yours
where her face meets yours
is also the name
take care
When later you fly from her and find yourself
in the crowd of nameless injured
who hunt like wraiths in number
take care
Of a world that already leaves
for names it already lost its wilderness
burns the fire nears
the gauze sun hangs
behind an evening afternoon
this too
is the name
Take care of every letter
erased from mine
each will appear
hidden in the house of yours
Take care
whatever it is you are
that precedes Aletheia
of your name in hers
You are not
but soon you will be
someone’s daughter