He browns now gently and I think I can understand everything in the universe, from cloud down to smallest berry and cliche. Nut brown, two words I would never have used in my copy, now speak more truth than Tintern Abbey. Obie, my hazelnut, your fine white hairs stipple your nut brown back, and—had I listened more carefully, or at all, to your philosopher mother—I’d know the name this pale fur had in her lovely womb. Or the name of the curd that covered you in birth and that was my first sight of you, seen in the chrome convex mirror of the operating room lamp, it my lens to your dawning from the blood-rich and severe flap of your mother’s belly under the lime green mountains of the sterile field upon which Caesars played.
Obie, your nipples are pale as shadows (as hers were dark as raspberries). Two lines of grime are sketched in the folds under your neck. Your eyelids roll as you dream behind them. You mew. A motor is failing out on the lake, but revives again as Matins is ending with your muttering waking song.