When Judgment Comes: A Poem

Voices ask you to rebrand, desist, forget who you are

After Rilke’s Torso of an Archaic Apollo

When Judgment comes, it’s not what you expect: no nighttime premonition by the lake, no noisy crowd the morrow, no swinging sword, no ice queen before whom you kneel.

It comes to your bedroom. It knocks, but you don’t hear it. It tunnels in, dislodging sand from roots. Its demands are bundled. It expands: underground, it hisses, replicates, more heads, less torso, yet less careful than you feared. Rolling in, eye-rattling, it feigns to speak, calling your name, blanking its own.

Now you see your sword, flat and sharp, rising in the ether, and you do walk it, an ice bridge to the moon. You transcend, and evermore there is no prismed place on Earth where your body isn’t. How false was Judgment, how weak its tendrils, how manifold its pleas that you rebrand, desist, forget who you are. Not here, not now. You will not change your life.

Tucker Lieberman has a poetry collection, Enkidu is Dead and Not Dead / Enkidu está muerto y no lo está. He wrote a long essay for Prism & Pen about names and branding.