Helping Someone Name a New Company

for Marianne Moore

We sought a short word or noun phrase which was
unique, easy to pronounce, spelled like it sounds.

It had to convey something of the business without boxing it in,
and of course not already taken: domains, twitter, facebook,
nor have unfortunate interior spellings like newspaperverts or the like.

Lacking millions of dollars worth of television
coining a word and teaching everyone to say it wasn’t an option,
which let out the synthetic sounds of pharmaceuticals:
Gornext, Lytexia, and Nambivala, to give away
a few derivative examples.

The final result has the meaningless appeal
of fruit on a white ceramic plate
and the phrase sounds finished like fine wood
when you say it on the telephone,
answering a switchboard, perhaps,
or a help desk in a skyscraper,
and you may imagine someone asserting it
and that it’s good for a founder to be a poet.