Jake Skeets: 'He Said My Name'


Jake Skeets (photo: Bear Guerra)

Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Waters Edge. Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico, he holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, American Book Award, and Whiting Award. He is from the Navajo Nation and teaches at the University of Oklahoma. "He Said My Name" is a poem excerpted from his second collection, Horses (Milkweed Editions), which tracks impacts of climate change on the land and its myriad inhabitants.

He said my name is really a kiln, a haul of groundwater
because mouths open into hot vapor. He said my name
is actually a riverbed. He said to make of my name a choking
of cracked ice. He said to say my name is old water in a ditch.

He said to make of my name a peach tree on fire, a palm
of pollen. He said my name is really an aquifer, an aster field,
an orchestra of damp tarps in a sheep corral, a downed pole
in Rocksprings. He said my name is as tall as a smokestack.

He said my name tends to cause a draft, to be a touch of tequila.
He said my name is reed, heavy blue mornings
in June. He said to make of my name wildfire smoke.
He said my name is rumor, the low beams of a pickup.

He said my name is really a sermon of locusts, boulder rust
in a river gorge. He said to make of my name a desert garden.
He said my name is the one pink evening when you whisper
your name to the moon and it whispers back in monsoon.