The Newborn

The swaddled newborn startles awake at a quarter to midnight. I plug his mouth with a powder blue pacifier bearing an elephant with a right ear so large it emerges stone soft, shaded blue, white sharply outlined. The eye drawn in a horseshoe shape makes it somehow female, downward-looking as if charmed by the field of starry campion and flat-topped aster tucked away in the semi-shade behind her.

He sleeps, and I wonder why the last thing I notice about him is the ruffled breathing, little breaths trying to mass together but cresting like a stillborn wave in the lake belonging to the port town with streets so small, they look like they should be on the board of a children’s game or in an old cartoon. His breaths build up to nothing more than half sighs, and air snagged in the throat a second—a satin cape torn by a rose’s thorn hidden in the oblique dark.

The sour milk smell of him fades when I untangle my nose from his few tufts of hair as if sprung up between flowers or in the cracks of sidewalks. The arm jerks up half or fully asleep. He wriggles spasmodically as if he’s trying to break out of a shell or shake free of this world.

I almost always forget about how kissing his cheek leaves a soft impression on my lips. His skin, cool and taut, lingers there until I wipe it away with the back of my hand, the hairs sweeping the impression into a bin.

The last thing I always think of is the taste of tiramisu and chamomile and watermelon still in my mouth. An afterthought, as I’ve never known the taste of this world until my son came screaming into it, making the abstractions (no more of this world than rabbits are of hats) fade into the savanna where light spreads across the woodland-grassland as far and wide as it wants.