A dad sits on
a subway seat
across from
his small child in a pram,
the apparatus
pressed protectively
against the
man’s paternal knee –
a boy who
might be two, or three –
and whose
entire interest seems to be
to see what Daddy’s
looking into
on his iPad.
The toddler’s candor
has no filter
– full of the exactitude
of focused
want without the least tight
fraught
anxiety. Finally he grabs
the black
thing from his dad
and takes a
look, and I see what he sees,
imagining he
can’t believe the sight:
in the iPad’s
rectangle of light appear
parades of tiny
broken spheres
and crossed
maneuvers,
small black
marks whose secret gears,
all splayed
in lines upon the white,
seem quite –
well I cannot requite
my passion to
know what the toddler
thought: it
seemed he simply took it in
and took it
in and took it in again:
spirit
feeding on whatever Daddy
would have
said he had been
reading. If I
have ever seen a soul
as rapt yet
unperturbed as he,
I can’t remember when.
.