All the Names They Used for God

They are just so many stories patched together, so many forgotten days encased in bone and meat. One might unearth almost anything with enough searching. Being a muse is mostly this—a sifting through of memories to find something of merit, hauling it to the surface where it can shine. The endeavor has, at the best of times, an exotic appeal. Forget

In the depths of night, she returns to his room, sits silently by his bedside, watches the dreams scripting themselves against the insides of his eyelids.

He could not even buy her a wedding dress in which to leave him.

“This is what I feel all the time,” she says, “only it’s the whole world beating.” She pushes my hand closer until I’m afraid my fingers will go right through the skin, and that heart sounds like it could devour me.

There was even a time, decades ago now, when he began to write the poem, but it withered in his hands like a plucked flower. And so he learned to leave it alone, to let it grow in silence, until the silence consumed it, until the words fell asleep again beneath his skin. Now he wonders whether he will ever find them.

She was going, but for the moment, the ocean, the salt that filled his mouth, the rush and swell of the waves, all of it was real, all of it was as vibrant and as painful as anything he had ever known. The song twisted through him, and the last tenuous line that moored him to what had been his life gave way. He was laid open, filled to overflowing.