And this one,
"What We Need Words For."
"Each morning his baby fingers clack on the electronic keys
of the obsolete typewriter that my father left us when he died.
And what my son hears and loves is the sound of his own fingers
clattering into the world.
The zing of the carriage return.
The space bar like a runaway train,
clicking through the letters that he is only
beginning to recognize.
The hunt and peck of his own name.
We all stumble into ourselves like this.
Fitting our fingers to the shape of letters
while the page gallops out of reach.
And then we suddenly find it's loss
that drives him to the words.
Trying to pick out his own name among whatever
it's attached to himself, whatever he longs to answer.
Relating each day a letter to his sister
now gone from home far away in college.
The page, when it rolls off the cylinder,
is full of the rhythm of his furious digits.
All drive and urgency of expression.
A jumble of letters and numbers not words, not legible text,
but a sea of drift.
And yet at times in the broken lines a name,
a word floats up into view.
The first legibility of the heart, its exacting infancy.
Whoa.
Your brother, Jacob."