Birth of Attention

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.



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