a fortnight old and we visit

Max!

two weeks old,

and solid, and sure in himself,

long and lank and beautiful, 

easily drifting off into somewhere:

“into dreams?” I ask his dad,

and he questions that

“it’s hard to know what sort of narrative he could have. . .”

to which, his grandmama adds:

“maybe warmth and smell and touch and taste--

the proximity senses,” and then she cautions

“sight and sound are more distant,”

and I would add that any of us not a parent

are as distant as language and linear thinking,

though, for grandmama and me, he centers our universe,

Max curls, almost back to the fetal position,

the breast so almost a part of him 

that he can’t figure why it’s not there at once when he’s hungry,

I love to hold him and marvel at the curves

into which he shapes himself,

the fluttering of his hands as if he’s conducting,

“almost as if he’s playing charades

and we can’t guess what he’s acting out,” his father muses,

Max’s eyes open and move about,

though for now their input for him

 stays as the rawest of data,

contrast seems to draw them,

the sense of one that isn’t the other,

not light or dark itself, 

but where they both are, and meet,



that’s developmentally where he is,

a body new to this world

where both cold and warmth, hunger and food, coexist,

and he is on the path to learn

that the other is outside him,

that who he is is different,

and that much of life is the meeting of one’s self

with all that contrasts with the one.

by his loving grandfather, Henry H. Walker, January 11, ’13