Name

Where was my name before it was mine?
Unbegotten
It lay in a ditch
Of rotting reeds
Beneath sloughed reptile skins
And pine cones
Unripened
Unknown

Unsung
The clouds that hurried
Moonlit above dark earth
Knew it not
Neither was it voiced in thunder
The wind did not sing it
Nor was it found in the split of a stone

Unstitched
It did not appear on gym kits
Or school registers,
Tax forms, toothpaste surveys
It was not entreated to store credit
Nor digitally encrypted
Nor found on long-expired leases
Nor etched on bone

Other Roger Stevens
Smugly created complicated computer systems
Or archly textured buildings
Or kept themselves to themselves
Or wrote learned theses

Once called, the letters crept from dictionaries,
Or well-worn shiny-edged spelling Bs
Were lifted from lexicons
The Es swanking about, always popular
The V skulking in the corners like a thief

And my name was conjured
From a backwards echo
A retrospective prophecy
A splash of sunlight
On a passing gull’s wing
An overheard remark
In a darkened room

And my name was written
As a forgotten footnote
On the afterward
Of a tumbling leaf