Calling Out the Names
Stripped of leaves, each limb
exposed, maple remembers the whoosh
of branches lush with wind and shade.
Even frozen solid or emptied by drought, river
remembers flood banks, the pulse
of current.
Grain in the loaf remembers field.
Scar remembers knife, but also suture
and the hand that bandaged.
Bed recalls absent sleeper
damp breath on the pillow.
Brush, stilled on the dresser, remembers knots
and what followed the untangling.
Honey remembers hive, bee and blossom.
Salmon tastes home
in the scent
of its birth stream.
Sand remembers shell.
Gravel, the granite cliff.
Lung, breath. Throat, song.
And I remember you.
—Elizabeth Austen
Commissioned for the annual memorial service at Seattle Children’s Hospital.
Published in New England Review, Vol. 40, No. 4.
Formatting altered to negotiate the gap between my layout skills and the available options.
In many ways, my life hinges on the six months I spent traveling in the Andes region in my early thirties. Shortly before leaving Seattle to begin that open-ended trip (there’s nothing quite like flying to a new continent on a one-way ticket), a friend gave me Mary Oliver’s New and Selected, Vol. 1.
Elizabeth Austen 