Skip to main content

Belching Fish and Belly Buttons

His name is Jao
Nathaniel Jao Montri Hubbard
And he comes to our house
A time or two a week
So his Dad can go to work

He cannot walk, Jao cannot
So he runs as if pursued
By a notion that the earth is large
And that something is newer
Than he knows, not yet

What he does not know
Is that it is he who is new
And shall be newer still
If he does not overrun it

He looks at himself
As we see him: something shiny
Scrubbed and glad for life
When he laughs at belching fish
And foxes in the snow

It is all new, a hummingbird
A cow, a bath, a belly button

Come on, Jao, we say
Let's get the morning paper
And he runs because
He has not learned to walk

Not yet

Comments

  1. Love the essence of Jao in this post and the picture is one of the best yet!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

Under the Football Stands

There are times and places when and where the Milky Way really is a milky way; a ragged band of light stretching across the horizon.  I still recall--all this time later--catching sight of something much fainter than what you see here--asking my mother what the Milky Way was.  I do not recall her precise answer, probably because it was not precise.  I am not sure that there were many people--seventy or more years ago--who would have said, plainly, that it was what we see when we look toward the center of our galaxy; that our sun--our star--was one of an uncountable number of stars circling about what is undoubtedly a huge black hole, something like a swarm of bees caught in a cosmic maelstrom.   It is to look across the center of a monstrous swarm of stars.  It is brighter in that direction, quite naturally. Just as we had to get used to recognizing that our sun was a star, pretty much like most of the other stars we see, we had to remind ...