With such a name, your birth surely
carried a promise that could only
have been formed by a mother’s love
and by a father’s hope for the future. Or,
were you named after some long lauded dead ancestor:
some uncle of a moonshining grandfather,
the good son that raised tobacco,
that went bald fretting over the price of corn?
Whether you came to manhood behind the woodshed
With some precious preacher’s daughter
or in a Paris Brothel waiting for a deployment order
that never came, there may be no left alive who can recall; but
it will have to be enough that,
with such a prodigious name,
yours is listed in marble among others
that are also not yet all that too far from memory.
Location:Cincinnati, OH