Learning to Name by Walker Bass
for Bill Brown
He’d know the oak he evoked
for me in workshop, the one that marks
my place of peace, awaits me at its bend
in the trail; that chestnut swamp oak.
In his place of peace, he sits on a hill;
below, smoke from a chimney curls
and an apple orchard (now
supplanted by a music studio)
promises future fruit.
He’ll watch from crows’ height
this forever scene—
he’ll be forever wrenched
on beauty and brokenness,
the haunted sorrow a violin can play,
a fog over a bayou, the ethereal
emptiness – he’ll be wrenched forever
by the father dying in his arms.
Wrench, as circumstance wrenches,
turning the teen to a path
that tunes his inner ear
to hear the boom of paddle on pirogue,
a girl casting for channel cats, a rusty pail
of chicken livers kissing red smiles
on a boat’s floor.
He hears all this, though the eye
only sees fog and
suggestions
of cypress trees
hung with Spanish moss.
