By the time that I arrived
you could not say my name
for the aphasia.
The bleeding stopped,
they told me in the hall,
but you had lost the letter S.
You couldn’t name the shape on paper
or press the sound against your teeth.
They explained it as a loss of data,
as if the program of you crashed
then restarted incompletely.
Or, I thought privately,
as if the hand of some indifferent angel
had held a magnet to your disc.
You greeted me
in a terror of apology,
hysterical to demonstrate
you knew me still,
although you could not find the word
to designate your second son.
In a panic you recited
a slew of scattershot details—
my birth weight, current address,
my affinity for word games,
my allergy to dogs—
my life a scattered deck of cards.
I tried and failed to calm you,
garish
with a crisp bouquet in crackling paper
and a voice I’d practiced in the car.
But you could not be distracted,
were only driven to a fresh distress
on finding yourself helpless
to fashion even an apology
from the words left at your disposal.
The ideas were falling fast inside your head,
but their parachutes would not inflate.
You regarded me, unblinking,
palms pressed against your cheeks.
I was ushered out the door
to relieve your agitation.
In the hallway,
sitting in a plastic chair,
I had the very strong impression
that my name itself had broken.
Mechanically, like an overburdened axle.
A name that can’t be spoken
by the person who conferred it
has plainly failed its purpose,
outlasted all utility.
If I could relive our episode entirely
I’d hand the flowers to a passing nurse,
march into your room with an alphabet beneath my arm,
escort the doctors to the door,
and dispense with all their Latin chatter.
“Here,” I’d say and lay each shape against the bedsheet,
“find some combination
of our twenty-five good letters
and make me a new name.”