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If I have created a world for you, in your place, god, you had to come to it confident, and you have come to it, to my refuge, because my whole world was nothing but my hope. I have been saving up my hope in language, in a spoken name, a written name; I had given a name to everything, and you have taken the place of all these names. Now I can hold back my movement inside the coal of my continual living and being, as the flame reins itself back inside the red coal, surrounded by air that is all blue fire; now I am my own sea that has been suddenly stopped somewhere, the sea I used to speak of, but not heavy, stiffened into waves of an awareness filled with light, and all of them moving upward, upward. All the names that I gave to the universe that I created again for you are now all turning into one name, into one god. The god who, in the end, is always the god created and recreated and recreated through grace and never through force. The God. The name drawn from the names.

I should be happy with my lot: A wife and mother – is it not Enough for me to be content? What other blessing could be sent? A quiet house, and homely ways, That make each day like other days; I only see Time’s shadow now Darken the hair on baby’s brow! No world’s work ever comes to me, No beggar brings his misery; I have no power, no healing art With bruised soul or broken heart. I read the poets of the age, ’Tis lotus-eating in a cage; I study Art, but Art is dead To one who clamors to be fed With milk from Nature’s rugged breast, Who longs for Labor’s lusty rest. O foolish wish! I still should pine If any other lot were mine.

If the sea is a cathedral, a tide pool is a chapel. Sculpins dart under the wind that blusters their cupped oceans. Sculpted by wave on rock, their pockets of salt grow thin from the rain, the suffocating fresh water. Sculpin and hermit crab and limpet endure the sea's absence, the lost comfort of constant temperature, while the unconceived sky drums the roof over their pooled world with litanies of unbreathable torrent. Christ, I have no praise for you. Beyond saying a vodka-wrecked troller and shacks the color of the desire to die, beyond saying predatory snails that glide on their bellies like the penitent, flexing their borers, beyond saying seraphim that bicker exactly like gulls, the shells that are my ears sing no psalms except I can name many small creatures in the world of a tide pool. Christ, have mercy on all things that drown in air, I have no praise for you. I say the tide: Tide! Tide! Tide! I say:Ebb! Flood! Ebb! Flood! I always start with "Ebb!" I always end with "Flood!" "Names" is from a sequence titled "Hard Weather Prayers."

I am tired of having five different names;                      - Having to change them when I enter A new country or take on a new life. My First name is my truest, I suppose, but I Never use it and nobody calls me by this Vietnamese Name though it is on my birth certificate— Tue My Chuc. It makes the sound of a twang of a String pulled. My parents tell me my name in Cantonese is Chuc Mei Wai. Three soft bird chirps and they call me Ah Wai. Shortly after I moved to the U.S., I became Teresa My Chuc, then Teresa Mei Chuc. “Teresa” is the sound Water makes when one is washing one’s hands. After my first Marriage, my name was Teresa Chuc Prokopiev. After my second marriage, my name was Teresa Chuc Dowell. Now I am back to Teresa Mei Chuc, but I want to go way back. Reclaim that name once given and lost so quickly in its attempt to become someone that would fit in. Who is Tue My Chuc? I don’t really know. I was never really her and her birthday on March 16, I never celebrate because it’s not my real birthday though it is on my birth certificate. My birthday is on January 26, really, but I have to pretend that it’s on March 16 because my mother was late registering me after the war. Or it’s in December, the date changing every year according to the lunar calendar—this is the one my parents celebrate because it’s my Chinese birthday. All these names and birthdays make me dizzy. Sometimes I just don’t feel like a Teresa anymore; Tue (pronounced Twe) isn’t so embarrassing. A fruit learns to love its juice. Anyways, I’d like to be string... resonating. Pulled back tensely like a bow Then reverberate in the arrow’s release straight for the heart.

Day by day the Missouri dropping lower under empty sky that had drained Okobojo, No Heart Creek, Whiteman Draw; every night still no moisture. Finally, a season late, the raw parched air turned and gathered over hardpan above Oahe, grumbling then breaking open all at once, sending runnels across the flats to spread and join and drag toward the river’s edge snatches of roots torn from ground where wind had settled the seeds once. Afterwards Will and Ellie, tromping in mud, scanned the rutted cow-paths for arrowheads that might've surfaced—traces of Black Buffalo, Big Foot, Touch the Clouds—quartz or chert or flint notched, chipped to different sizes and points for buffalo, deer, pheasant flushed out with a human howl, maybe with fire lit to the grasses, bitter scent of ash twisting in dust Ellie could smell like her own name unraveling, as she poked a glittering rock with her stick, heard the  meadowlarks question change to sputter, last flick of wings. Whatever she and Will might lift, turn over in their hands, take home, hide among their things—even relief after rain did not belong to them.

Like fishermen at dusk, the soldiers returned from war with stories slumped over their shoulders; their fingers firm at the knot, the netting, thick and tangled with the names of the dead. None could explain how the flood of life all around them escaped like water from between cupped hands, how the bodies of men they loved began to crust the earth like salt, how destruction danced slapdash and unashamed everywhere, and still they survived. When I came home from college proud, my educated mouth agape, a tackle box of words, slick and glossy and I saw the names of my friends, the young men I fought with, learned to drink with, and left behind Lil’Rocc, Pumpkin, Ulysses, Junebug, Aghoster names spray-painted throughout our neighborhood in memoriam, I couldn’t understand how a god could make one life possible and strip the world clean of so many, or how, like high-watermarks the dead remind the living of the coming of storms.

Some nights we feel the furred darkness of an ancient one's breath and are trapped in awakening, dismembered by events we no longer recall. We can touch the windowsill, where October air gathers as hours slip past in thin robes, the forest a concert of voices. The last crickets let go of their songs. The land speaks, its language arising from its own geography— the mountains' hulked shapes are blue whales, remembering when they were undersea ridges, and rivers are serpentine strands hammered from silver, and dark trees talk to the wind—weaving mortal lives, drumbeats, pillars of smoke, voices wavering into updraft, the storyteller shifting the present.

I've become the person who says Darling, who says Sugarpie, Honeybunch, Snugglebear—and that’s just for my children. What I call my husband is unprintable. You’re welcome. I am his sweetheart, and finally, finally—I answer to his call and his alone. Animals are named for people, places, or perhaps a little Latin. Plants invite names for colors or plant-parts. When you get a group of heartbeats together you get names that call out into the evening’s first radiance of planets: a quiver of cobras, a maelstrom of salamanders, an audience of squid, or an ostentation of peacocks. But what is it called when creatures on this earth curl and sleep, when shadows of moons we don’t yet know brush across our faces? And what is the name for the movement we make when we wake, swiping hand or claw or wing across our face, like trying to remember a path or a river we’ve only visited in our dreams.

Why not a crocus from this bulb? Why not the purple of bees’ lust so that, in honey, she might taste something good? Under skin, purple is a private taste, closer to the blood of her tongue, closer to the blood she chokes on when she’s gasping, to the clot behind her blackened eye. The heated force that slammed her shin, that pushed bone from the bone, that arched her but did not approach caress, is another kind of lust. Spring: a madness of grappling. Isn’t that what she sees outside every window? And inside? Nothing unique going on.

Grandma laughing on her deathbed. Eternity, the quiet one, listening in. Like moths around an oil lamp we were. Like ragdolls tucked away in the attic. In walked a cat with a mouthful of feathers. (How about that?) A dark little country store full of gravedigger’s children buying candy. (That’s how we looked that night.) The young men pumping gas spoke of his friends: the clouds. It was such a sad story, it made everyone laugh. A bird called out of a tree, but received no answer. The beauty of that last moment Like a red sail on the bay at sunset, Or like a wheel breaking off a car And roaming the world on its own.