You asked me who I was and I was afraid  
to say so, as if my name was a fence around me  
only recently overgrown. Like my name was up  
there fixing a weathervane in a thunderstorm.  
Or like it was trying to bury a dead animal at night  
with the ground already froze. As if my name was  
the exact number of minutes to sunrise. Or a bird  
any old scientist can tell what it doesn’t eat just by  
looking at its beak. Like a list of all the titles I ever  
checked out from the library, against a list of what  
they even had at that little two story thing in my old 
town. Like my name was a book I reread years on  
drenched in embarrassment at how many good parts  
my memory invented. Like my name was my mother  
retelling that one story on her first glass in years— 
well any story almost—but specifically the possum  
under the kitchen sink in that first cabin together.  
Like my father in the story, who on the insistence  
of his frightened wife, loads a gun as an act of love.  
Like my father in the world, who could never point  
a loaded anything at anything. Like the kind of love  
that squeezes in from the cold and makes a bed  
in the old sponges kept in that cabinet just in case  
they could be useful later. Like a thing only looking  
its way to keep keeping warm. Like playing dead  
in hopes of never hurting nobody. Like coming back  
to life in a full throated surprise. Like your name 
now in my voice. Or my name in yours. Or ours 
stretched out years after, like arms around us.