In the middle of the day

Letters - Poem

My head has been stuffed with clouds and airy things

They float around in there, not weighing me down as much as making it difficult to see.

I try to wave it away, to shoo it out like a deadly wasp, or maybe a drunken bee.

I’ve tried to capture them, like sucking them up into a vacuum and disposing them into a safer place in my mind.  I’ve placed them in the back somewhere.

Yet the wind has it’s way of breathing it all into yet another mess.  It’s all scrapes and papers floating around the air, becoming stealth vessels on their own, independent missions.

It all scatters, kicked up when I lay my head down.  In different ways I’ve looked for an equalizer. I thick layer of alcohol would do the trick.  But my eyes get sleepy after 3, and my bladder lets me know this isn’t what I thought it would be.

I’ve tried to build a bridge through the mist, to escape.  But the project was never completed.  It stands there, jutting out from my mind, with boards and drawings strewn about the site.

The harvest was plentiful, but the workers were few.  Some tried hard.  They really did.  Others were too distracted by the liquor store down at the bottom of the hill.

It still stands.

Like a half assembled dinosaur skeleton, from a billion years ago.

When things were different.

When I was writing you letters.

Inside

Yesterday, while holding my little guy River, I realized another amazing thing about babies.  They are like little sponges, soaking up information left and right.  It's all brand new, and you can almost see their "live action" processors holding new details.

I held a toy in front of him, and when it got his attention he focused in.  His eyes glared into the stuffy, his brain, no doubt, cranking the gears, trying to make sense of this new thing.  What I realized that day is that when he interacts with another person, and not just a toy, things are completely different.

The really neat thing is that babies have an immediate sense of how to interact with us.  They don't look at our mouths or are hands.  They're not aimlessly searching for clues.

They go straight to the eyes.

River makes contact with my eyes, looking for what's in there.  When I smile, he recognizes it, and smiles back, assured that he is experiencing a familiar and safe face.  The neurotransmitters are humming away, digging into the groove that will turn out to be the "dad is a safe person" pathway.

It's all so neat because it seems innate.  They don't learn to look in your eyes.  Once  their eyes grow enough to work, they immediately start focusing in on everything around them.  And again, when there is a person in their space, they go directly for their eyes.  It's really neat.