Baby Says “Sky”
By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 6/28/08
The senses, too, have a destined parentage, so that
Seeing these pastel clouds, blotted misshapenly
By sunlit boulders of weightless mass,
We hear our distracted father, his voice fading
As if he has just leaped off of a high, dark bridge:
“I have lost you, my innocence, my child,
And now I am sentenced to life by drowning.”
But before his suicide, the father had foretold
Of a frontier of perception, of clouds parted
By the to and fro of angels, of a shining canopy
Of enormous flowers and of burgeoning, unknowable
Trees, each thing and no-thing shaped and reshaped
Beyond his punitive editorial lash.
Here, the mother, so long disparaged for her
Style, sits quivering happily,
Sewing a patchworked fabric to seamlessness.
A new feminine sense receptor, conflating sight
And sound and taste and smell and touch,
Arises like honey just at the tip of the tongue —
In one sphere, matter a-swirl with simulation.
The angels stop for a second. The clouds stand still,
As that great frontier —
A blue made sweet by the mating of water and air —
Is at last traversed by a flight of infant words.
