My Name

Once when the lawn was a golden green

and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials

in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed

with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,

feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered

what I would become and where I would find myself,

and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant

that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard

my name as if for the first time, heard it the way

one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off

as though it belonged not to me but to the silence

from which it had come and to which it would go.