Maiden Name

[sadoeuphemist]

Now listen, that's my mother's name,
the name she used before she wore a face.
I can't pronounce it properly anymore,
not here, out in the sunlight, out in the open air.
It should be spoken in a cavern, in a lagoon,
and echo off the mossy walls, be half-swallowed
by the dark. It should falter from your tongue
like an eddy of translucent scales, like
the discarded skin of something plunged
beneath the waves, something deeper now,
and gone.

These things don't work like blood, you know.
There's no trace of her name left running through me. 

Maybe we might see the ghost of it, written
with a finger over poured concrete,
tracing the raised ridges of the fossil in the shale
deep beneath the earth. Or hear her name whispered
through the rattling of the pipes right before
the shock of icy water against naked flesh - a reminder
of huddling defenseless, scared and cold,
before walls, before the foundations all were laid,
before our kitchenware, the refrigerator on at night
with its electric hum. As if we were naked, still,
in the darkness, blood set in our veins; in
the home we built our bedrock on.