Baby
The baby lies sleeping in bed. Greedily in, each breath is taken. Surrendered peacefully, each breath is expelled. The sound, rhythmic, makes strange music, vibrating off the pillows and colorful afghan.
She is not a baby anymore, but she is not anything else either. She wets the bed and is afraid of the dark, sucks on her lip like some suck their thumbs.
I am a fool first, and her mother second. Eventually I will be nothing. Then I will not regret, as I do now, that I did not hold her in my arms when she strayed from bed, but rather directed her back to it.
Then I will have no memory in which to keep the sound of her munching an apple behind my back. I will never have known its color, because I did not turn to look at her. I only now hear the echo of her tiny teeth tearing into the crisp flesh of fresh fruit. In the moment in which she eats the apple, I am too busy to hear it. Only later my mind plays it back for me.
But when I am nothing first, I will have no future to busy me, nor a past to regret. If by then I have not learned to inhabit now, I will not be.
When the fool dies, and the mother dies, if she has not collected enough silence to fill her shape that it may crystallize within it, she will not be nothing; she will not be at all.
Then will baby be? Or is she only a reflection of her mother, a tiny pool of silence bending light?
To baby mother, to mother baby.
I am a fool first.
Eventually I will be nothing.
If I am silence then baby will be silence, and we will flow one into the other as pure Being.
Now I will hold her as a colorful afghan and she holds me as strange music. In this moment the light of the lamp seems to seep into the walls. The walls hold us both, warming us with the light they bend. Mingled with her music; the sigh of the furnace, the hum of the computer, the erratic click and tap of my fingers on its keys.
Our fragile bodies work frantically without our notice, keeping us a part of this organic orchestra. We are a part of the white noise, momentarily harmonic enough to emerge as something distinct, soon to rejoin the chamber in its symphony of silence.
I hear it now, and you will hear it too.
Greedily in, each breath is taken.
Surrendered peacefully, each breath is expelled.
Lying asleep in bed, bounding limitless across the dream of it, she is not a baby anymore, but she is not anything else either.
She is not a baby anymore, but she is not anything else either. She wets the bed and is afraid of the dark, sucks on her lip like some suck their thumbs.
I am a fool first, and her mother second. Eventually I will be nothing. Then I will not regret, as I do now, that I did not hold her in my arms when she strayed from bed, but rather directed her back to it.
Then I will have no memory in which to keep the sound of her munching an apple behind my back. I will never have known its color, because I did not turn to look at her. I only now hear the echo of her tiny teeth tearing into the crisp flesh of fresh fruit. In the moment in which she eats the apple, I am too busy to hear it. Only later my mind plays it back for me.
But when I am nothing first, I will have no future to busy me, nor a past to regret. If by then I have not learned to inhabit now, I will not be.
When the fool dies, and the mother dies, if she has not collected enough silence to fill her shape that it may crystallize within it, she will not be nothing; she will not be at all.
Then will baby be? Or is she only a reflection of her mother, a tiny pool of silence bending light?
To baby mother, to mother baby.
I am a fool first.
Eventually I will be nothing.
If I am silence then baby will be silence, and we will flow one into the other as pure Being.
Now I will hold her as a colorful afghan and she holds me as strange music. In this moment the light of the lamp seems to seep into the walls. The walls hold us both, warming us with the light they bend. Mingled with her music; the sigh of the furnace, the hum of the computer, the erratic click and tap of my fingers on its keys.
Our fragile bodies work frantically without our notice, keeping us a part of this organic orchestra. We are a part of the white noise, momentarily harmonic enough to emerge as something distinct, soon to rejoin the chamber in its symphony of silence.
I hear it now, and you will hear it too.
Greedily in, each breath is taken.
Surrendered peacefully, each breath is expelled.
Lying asleep in bed, bounding limitless across the dream of it, she is not a baby anymore, but she is not anything else either.
posted by Mad Dog at 11:57 AM
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