Perfect Strangers
June 27 2014


The perfect strangers
who surround us everyday.
Ebb, flow, part
as we make our way
to corner shops, desk jobs,
the bus stop

near home.

Other obstacles
you have no trouble dodging.
Locked bikes, minus their seats,
scrawny trees
that could use a good watering.
And fire plugs 
which don't bring up

annoyance, fear, disgust.

So unlike

this jostling crowd of us.

The sea of people, the water in which we swim
feels over-heated, wind-whipped,

too impure

to even dare sipping. 

As skin-to-skin
the subway sways
against a clammy stranger;
as perfect an alien
as I am to him.
But this earnest kid
feet dangling playfully
beamed a smile my way.
It was automatic, smiling back
and I did.

How great it felt;
perfect strangers
immersed in the same Sargasso Sea,
blowing bubbles for kicks
and watching them pop.

Different fish
in the fast current
more similar than they thought.
Who briefly let themselves drift
instead of swimming quite so hard.


The theme of a recent DNTO episode (a CBC radio story-telling broadcast/podcast) was "get(ting) strange with strangers". The expression "perfect strangers" came up, and the inherent tension of this word immediately seized my imagination: "perfect" meaning both absolute and ideal.

In the anonymity of the big city, in this age of time pressure and congestion, other people become easily dehumanized: they are simply impediments and obstacles, no different from street furniture and other objects. But in all of these stories, the encounters are the opposite: they are all about affirmation, uplift, unexpected pleasure. Which is what you'd expect of human beings, such an intensely social animal.

When I think of city crowds, the feeling I get is of a hot and humid place, of claustrophobia verging on submersion. So the idea of water as metaphor came easily. "Alien" reinforces the first connotation of "perfect": that of the absolute stranger. The small imagined anecdote -- taking the small risk of opening up -- evokes the other.

(I do realize that the doldrums of the "Sargasso Sea" contradicts "fast current". So perhaps Sargasso Sea should be interpreted as more of a psychological place; while the fast current is the actual speeding train.)

Not that this is me. I'm the worst stranger:  putting my head down in my hermetic bubble and plowing on ahead, oblivious. I don't easily meet stranger with either confidence, or the expectation of pleasure. Even though I’m sure I'd be better off if I did!

The Descent of Man
June 24 2014


We are 2% Neanderthal
more or less.

Our ancestors met, befriended
fell in love;
or, to be anthropologically correct
bred.
Precocious experiments
in evolution.

Hairy babies
built like wrestlers, square-jawed leading men,
who were good with their hands
but just didn't get it.
The subtle cues
of facial expression,
the minutiae
of language arts.
Because humans
are empathetic,
Neanderthals not.

We are social creatures,

like termites
clustered in their high-rise mounds.

Who alone, will die,
stranded insects
emitting soundless cries.

I contain the past
all the life before me.
Cockroach, vole, T Rex
my Neanderthal ex,

the good breeding, the missing links.
And vying for attention, along with them

the gut, the head

the sex.

Like the gun, under my bed
the next-door neighbour's fence.
The descent of man
depends
on careful listening.


I like the subtle double-entendre of "descent" and "life before me".

The first evokes the evolutionary tree, branching upward, which we often imagine with a connotation of progress, direction, intent. Of course, this isn't at all how it works. Intelligence is not privileged; and there is no inevitable and endpoint, no clear apotheosis. Evolution is a lot more accident and knife-edge survival and starting over. (After all, the most ancient living creatures, no matter how simple they are -- like roundworms, jelly fish, sharks -- are arguably the most successful from an evolutionary point of view: so well-adapted, they have survived unchanged. We are so recent and may prove in the end to be so transient, it will take a few million years before one is entitled to say the same about us!)

But "descent" also means climbing down: the ladder, the branches, the tree. It evokes loss and diminution, a return to something simpler and more primordial. It goes both forward and back.

As with "life before me", a Janus-like expression that looks both ways at once: not just what came before, at an earlier time, but what may come after, stretching out "before me" into some hypothetical future. So the conflation of the two meanings again raises this idea of returning to the primordial: if our ancestors were voles, will our descendants be?

The "descent of man" -- that is, our continued ascent (a subjective proposition, I grant!); or, if not, at least our basic survival -- depends on that essentially human suite of genes winning out over our inner Neanderthal: the suite of genes behind our language, sociability, and powers of empathy; which are the three essential things that together make us unique in the animal world. Communication skills define us. "Listening" is the last word of the poem for a reason.

The natural question is "why just 2%"? Because a lot of those mixed babies, the ones who missed these essential human traits, didn't make it. We didn't so much defeat our Neanderthal cousins in tribal combat; our offspring just went about living more successful lives in stronger communities. So in the other 98%, the miscegenation of Sapien and Neanderthal led to an evolutionary dead-end

I know "sociability" must sound odd, coming from an unusually solitary human (me!), who inhabits the long tail of the bell-curve of human temperament. But even oddballs and eccentrics are critical ingredients of collective evolutionary success: they represent diversity, which confers resilience in the face of rapid and unexpected change. Especially when in Nature, the unexpected is exactly what we have to expect.

As to the rest of the poem, there's no gun under my bed.

And fences do make good neighbours, even among social animals. Although I'm not sure what Robert Frost really meant: was it about territory and tribe, blood and belonging, the respecting of borders; or was it about the co-operation necessary to build something together?

And I like to think I'm ruled far more by my head than my gut. Except that if the behavioural economists and psychologists are right, we have no idea about our true motivations and decision-making, and are a lot less self-aware than we believe: we only flatter ourselves to imagine we are mostly rational creatures.

I hope readers will excuse "the descent of man". Being a middle aged middle class white male -- in other words, a charter member of the reviled patriarchy -- please indulge my preference for traditional modes of expression, even if they do contravene politically correct notions of gender neutrality. Just accept that old guys are beyond redemption; and anyway, hardly worth the trouble!

The Art of Reinvention

June 23 2014

Fingernails on a blackboard.

This may leave you puzzled,
too young

to remember fresh chalk, dusty brushes.
When each morning began
with a clean slate,
bleary-eyed
usually late.

At home, your role was the youngest child,
when children
were seen and not heard.
And at school, an aspiring nerd
in the subterranean world
of the deeply uncool.

But in summer you learned
the art of reinvention.
2 months at camp,
when all the preconceptions
of who you are
were off,
you slate wiped clean
and you could be anything – within reason – you wanted.

Now, like most golden ages
this time seems mythological,
the stuff
of wistful longing.
You are who you are, what you’ve become;
the world knows you this way
and change
is surely impossible.

So must age
leave us narrow, rigid, afraid?
Will it ever
be summer again?

Today is the longest day.
Now, the light begins
its imperceptible waning,
a cautionary tale
of interminable winter.

When I remember freedom
with the electric thrill
of fingernails on a blackboard.
When I think of clean slates
and immortality.
Of chalky nubs, thinning brushes,
that never quite
come free of dust.


I'm not sure they even have blackboards at schools these days. Whiteboards? Screens?

Anyway, I was reading a review of a recently released movie, Obvious Child. Its star and creative force is the actress Jenny Slate (better known as a comedian, an alumnus of Saturday Night Live). At one point, she describes herself as an outcast in high school who was able to re-invent herself (or at least freely express her essential self) as an entertainer at summer camp. Summer camp is an extraordinary and protected space: both the time of life – a time of beginnings, and infinite potential; and the place, with its heady freedom from structure, want, responsibility. Her comment really resonated with me: this idea that at this rarefied place called summer camp you were free to re-invent yourself – for perhaps the first and last time in your life. My lifestyle and sense of self still owe a great deal to that long ago experience.

Of course, the article was cleverly (if somewhat obviously!) entitled "A Clean Slate". Which ended up giving me the central metaphor of the poem.

I've never before written about my summer camp experience. So I thought a poem about that subject deserved at least a try. My concern was that it would be so narrow and personal, my hypothetical reader would quickly glaze over and flip the page. So I tried to find something universal: this idea that, with age, most of us allow ourselves to get walled-in by experience and expectation and fear; that change becomes hard, and horizons narrow.

Acquisition

June 20 2014

The urge to collect
comes to its natural end.

The necessities, of course.
But then, the pleasure of acquisition wanes;
the uncompleted sets,
dust collectors
and never opened books.

You have amassed, hoarded, stored
a lifetime of objects,
like talismans
you believed would protect.
Only to realize
you will enter the future light,
dead-weight
just pulls you down.

The books, stacked ceiling high
once help you up,
the proximity of wisdom
seemed good enough.
But now, you feel the urge to write
your own
unencumbered future,
on a journey, wherever
with only what's on your back --
a seeker, sojourning in desert,
Samaritan
at the side of the road.

Fast, and nimble
with all that baggage

left behind.
A child who trusts
that fate somehow provides.


Collecting can becomes pathological: the hoarders, the obsessive-compulsives.

But we all collect, acquiring way too much stuff throughout our lives; stuff that just attracts dust, while mildly rebuking us:  both as the residue of unrealized ambitions, and as mementos of our previous selves. And offering a kind of psychological protection as well: in the comfort of the familiar, and as a bulwark against the future. And then the sentimental stuff, of course; which no one else could possibly understand.

I read an essay about a chaotic basement chock full of unread books: the pathological kind of collecting that becomes an end in itself. But it also represents a kind of potential: a belief in self-improvement, and that the future is always a better place. That is where this poem started. In the end, the man is struck down by debilitating illness, while his long-suffering and resentful wife rediscovers the downstairs. And as she organizes the place, starts to take great delight in reading through it.

Material things hold no attraction for me, other than utility. Possession doesn't confer security, and I'm not motivated by status or fashion or envy. But still, at this late (not that late, I hope -- but still!) stage of my life, I can look around and see that I've acquired way too much. Instead of feeling comforted, I just feel weighed down. So this is basically another tired juvenile anti-materialistic rant; but nicely disguised as the wisdom of an older man!

The part about the seeker in the desert comes from an ancient and seemingly universal tradition: the spiritual practice of seeking wisdom/transcendence/revelation by means of an ascetic and solitary journey into the wilderness. Like all those Biblical prophets sojourning in the desert, enlightenment comes through renunciation.

The Power of Invisibility

June 17 2014

The cloudy liquid.

The smooth meniscus

that clings to glass.

The turbid surface, undisturbed

covered 
in fine brown scum.

The dry leaves

about to drop,

edges curling, turgor gone.  

As quickly as newsprint, left in the sun

brittles and fades.

Old newspapers

that aren’t worth saving. 

And the velvet petals

in their vivid paint,

now delicate, and thin

as aging skin.

An untended flower

wilts

even in cool shade.

But take care, and little changes,

except it dies

a day or 2 later

at best.

Rootless, fruitless, plain

the birds and bees

have moved on to more brilliant blooms, tempting scents.

Like all old things

the power of invisibility

is all that’s left.

Leaves floating

on airless water,

petals scattered

at the base of the vase.

And who has ever

seen them drop?

A fun party game is to ask everyone which super-power they’d chose:  flight, or invisibility. The first time I heard this, the answer was obvious, and I immediately laughed to/at myself:  I’m already utterly invisible. Flight, of course! Who would possibly chose to be invisible?!!

We all become increasingly invisible as we get older. I think women, especially, who go from resenting the “male gaze” to secretly longing to once again be the object of attention, of mystery and desire. In the poem, the neglected flower becomes a metaphor for this near universal experience.

(I think the correct pronunciation of "vase" is with a long "a": as in "vAYse". But here, it only works if you say it the way I usually do, which is the more breathy "vAAHz": then it works nicely with "water" and "drop".) 

Perfect Weather for Drying Clothes
June 11 2014


Perfect weather for drying clothes.
So why am I doing laundry
on the one day of the year
it feels like paradise?
When the sun is high, and the air dry
and the blackflies
have not yet begun
their persecution?

A gentle wind
ripples the clothes
neatly pegged to their line,
like multi-coloured prayer flags
snapping smartly.
Not abasement, or supplication, or fear,
but gratitude
to the weather gods,
through whose gracious dispensation I stand
naked, on the back deck,
with wet clothes, wooden pegs
the reassuring sense
of order conferred.

The sun burns.
The creaky wheel
stiffly turns.
And the line curves
in a widening smile
as it fills,

the beatitude of no-iron dry.
Each piece of clothing

telling a story
of provenance, and when I wore it,
or with whom
I took it off.

The perfect day for drying clothes
is when you need none.
How good it feels;
hot sun, on bare skin
bug-free,
a cool breeze

tempering the warmth.

A perfect day
for everything-into-the-wash.
For a fresh start,
naked as the day you were born.


Total privacy here; and a great way to do something useful while catching some rays. And it makes me realize that even when it's warm, between the bugs and the rain and the wind, it's not every day you get to dry laundry outdoors. (Not to mention how infrequently I do laundry!)

I've used the "prayer flag" analogy in a previous clothesline poem (I think this is either the 3rd or 4th of that rare genre of poetry!), and along with "paradise" it naturally led to the religious metaphor that infuses the rest of the piece. "Beatific smile” crossed my mind, but "bountiful" sounded better, and then “widening” won out; so it was left to “beatitude”, which got its own line. The word fits nicely with "provenance":  not the idea of origin, but the echo of "providence" -- the provision through grace. And the only kind of prayer I find legitimate: that is, an offering gratitude; rather asking for things, or abasing yourself in fear and shame and guilt.

Chores like doing laundry do just what I said: confer a gratifying sense of order; give the illusion of a fresh start. So "naked as the day you were born" ends up bringing the piece full circle.

Warm Moist Soil
June 8 2014

To plant a garden in spring.

To clear standing stalks
caught by snow.

Dig your hands
into warm moist soil.

Nest miracle seeds
in mother earth,
tamped down
with just enough firmness.

In a straw hat
under hot sun,
buzzing bugs
circling.

Has little to do with harvest.
The tomato you will pluck, still warm.
The green frills of kale
that surprise you with their sweetness.
The technicolor carrot
as it emerges,
crunchy, fat

blinking back
unaccustomed light.

It's all about process, journey, moment;
not deferred gratification
but this very stuff.
You tend, bend your back
feel close to the soil,
doing, until it's done.
Water and weed, and things will grow
no matter what.

It is day one
of this year's garden.
After you've patiently watched

your small fenced plot
filling with snow,
waited for winter to pass.
Which gets longer, and harder
the older you grow,
even though time goes fast.

And now, at last
the heady smell
of loamy soil,
hot sun at your back. 

This is a poem that needs absolutely no explanation. So I'll just note that I tried to infuse it with sensation, physicality, and the satisfied feeling of manual labour. ( ...I'll also say that I'm picturing my next door neighbour, Connie Latimer, hard at work!)

I also can't help pointing out a clever internal rhyme; one that is probably too clever to be noticed! But I smile inwardly when I read "earth"/"firmness"/"circling"/"emerges"/ and "deferred". Just sayin'!

Incidentally, the poem carries on the theme of "being in the moment", from the previous poem (Water-Bug). In the same spirit, I quite like the gardener's practical philosophy of deferred gratification: that gardening is not only an act of faith, but its own reward. And further to faith, I would have liked to say more about the miracle of seeds: these small self-sufficient worlds that contain the miniature of a life, like a puny plant homunculus; all the instructions and nutrients in a tiny indestructible package. In the practice of gratitude (as well as poetry) , a good part is observing the miraculous in the everyday.

A lot to say, for a poem in need of nothing!

Water-Bug

June 7 2014

Forgetting

isn’t like the lost keys

your repeatedly mislay.

Retrace your steps, they say,

they’re here, somewhere.

When my father’s memory went

it was more like a lake had been drained,

the same calm surface

but nothing there,

no dimension, no depth.

Not the keys

but the whole damned car.

His famous stories

embellished, and flawed, as we remember them

have not yet gone;

but he has,

his entire past

lost.

Although he recognizes me

with enthusiastic ease

and is sweeter than I recall.

The very same man,

but without the strength

and in constant need of reminding.

So what goes on

behind those calm receptive eyes

his placid helplessness;

any fear, or insight

sense of time?

If enlightenment

is letting go, renouncing attachment

then he is master of Zen,

inhabiting the moment

and the next ...the next.

Or a water-bug

skimming across what remains

of a perfectly reflective lake,

its imperceptible weight

barely creasing the glass,

surface tension, impervious

no matter the depth.

For a thing to be lost

it must be possible to find.

While this is more like dying, than mislaid.

A death without an after-life

to reunite, and reminisce.

A Tall Drink
June 6 2014


A tall drink
in high summer.

When unsparing sun

beats down,
and even the shade is unbearable,
in torpid heat
thickly humid air.

The ice clinks
as you gently swirl the glass,
a tall thick-walled tumbler

with a pleasing heft.

Not frosted, or beaded, or damp
but soaking wet,
water pouring-off
your slickly gripping hand.

You sip, knowing the ice won't last,
and the cool liquid
temporarily quenches.
Something bitter, on a summer day,
because a cloying drink
cannot cut the heat,
makes you even lazier.

The dog, spread-eagled in shade
pants and yelps,
gnashing her teeth
in fitful sleep.
As you, too, can't help but fade away,
the lassitude of afternoon
like a weight
bearing down on the world.

When all sensible creatures
declare a truce,
predator and prey
belly-up to the watering hole,
loll in cool mud.

And even the buzz of insects
dies down
as they lie in wait for dusk,
small black bodies
soaking-up the sun.
And the fly, you absentmindedly swatted
turns a dry hard husk,
a quick desiccation
instead of messy rot.

Your drink, empty;
the sun-bleached deck
hellishly hot.
 

This is the first hot humid day, when I was reminded of the enervating torpor of summer. You go outside, and immediately feel drained. The wind is still, and nothing seems to move: the birds are roosting, the dogs sensibly sleep, and even the insects have found some shade in which to rest. Only mad dogs, and Englishmen, as Noel Coward famously quipped ...!

A tall cool drink came to mind. This immediately appealed to my love of microcosm: to close observation of the small and everyday. So I wanted to describe the heft of the glass, the sound of the ice, the condensation soaking off. A gin and tonic, for sure. The stylistic challenge here is in getting the musicality in the language, and in getting just how much to say (where less is always more, and I have a unfortunate tendency to say too much).

Of course, description can't carry a poem or sustain the interest of a reader, so I let my stream of consciousness go, tried to find some narrative thread, and then in the end  zeroed-in on the tall cool drink: the satisfying sense of completion of circling back.

Well-Used
June 3 2014


This object began as light
air, water.

It was cut, cleanly off

at the crotch of a sturdy branch.

Like a severed leg
which no longer bends,
has not yet learned
to walk.

It was carved by hand
and eye,
rubbed to a silky finish;
so smooth
you want to touch, hold
never let go.
Fine-grained, along its length,
and so richly stained
the grain magnifies
contrast darkens.

But mostly, where it was gripped,
where pressure and sweat and grit
and the skin's natural oils
infused the wood with wear,
the deep patina
only time bestows.

And wood is always warm
to the touch.
Your tongue will freeze
to steel
plastic cracks.
But wood forgives;
like home,
takes you back, no matter what.

The walking stick
with its metal tip, and burnished handle
conserves the curve of the branch
from which it grew,
contains the light
the great oak drew.

But where it was held
is the truth
of a singular object;
well-loved
as it was well-used.

I just read this poem in The New Yorker (June 9 & 16, 2014 - see below), and felt inspired.

I love wood: the beauty of its grain, its burnished smoothness, the way it ages, how it reflects its years of use. I was thinking of a heavy ornate door, a big chunky handle that has fit thousands of hands. But the poem ended up in a walking stick. Perhaps too many episodes of Antiques Roadshow!

It's also a paean to craftsmanship, to graceful ageing, to the antithesis of obsolescence.

Anyway, I stole the idea, but ended up going in a very different direction: with neither Richardson’s personification, or existential angst. This is the line that probably most influenced my opening, and got me started: "Its branchings have slowed the invisible feelings of light." I love the idea of all those years of sun contained in a piece of wood; of the wood as "a standing wave" that conflates both time and stillness. So in my poem, it becomes “began in light”, and later “contains the light the great oak drew.”

I went more for the sensuous (a word I repeatedly and embarrassingly confuse with sensual; but actually got right this time!) aspect than the philosophical. And so a more descriptive, simple, accessible poem. Which may not be as challenging either to read or write, but suits me better. And incidentally continues the theme of things/objects, from my previous piece (Stuff).

 

ESSAY ON WOOD

BY JAMES RICHARDSON.

At dawn when rowboats drum on the dock

and every door in the breathing house bumps softly

as if someone were leaving quietly, I wonder

if something in us is made of wood,

maybe not quite the heart, knocking softly,

or maybe not made of it, but made for its call.

Of all the elements, it is happiest in our houses.

It will sit with us, eat with us, lie down

and hold our books (themselves a rustling woods),

bearing our floors and roofs without weariness,

for unlike us it does not resent its faithfulness

or question why, for what, how long?

Its branchings have slowed the invisible feelings of light

into vortices smooth for our hands,

so that every fine-grained handle and page and beam

is a wood-word, a standing wave:

years that never pass, vastness never empty,

speed so great it cannot be told from peace.

Stuff

June 2 2014

A lifetime of things
in a small apartment,
faithfully kept, as time went on
for sentimental reasons.
A thoughtful gesture, honoured,
someone loved, and lost.
And sometimes just left
because we forgot.

The inertia of things
that accumulate.
The way sediment settles out
on the ocean floor
accretes into rock.
As unseen

as that murky bottom,
and almost as permanent.

They were dusted, once;
but now it accumulates
with the dull patina of age,
subduing colour, softening edges,
acidic particles
minutely etching
finely polished surfaces.

Long enough together
and people are unable to see
their knickknacks and whatnots,
as if ever-present
constant as geology.
And anyway, find comfort

in familiar things,

seek shelter there.

Which, in the fullness of time
will be left to their descendants,
who have an eye for expensive antiques
and tut-tut despairingly
at all the clutter and junk
collecting dust.
Who will order a big steel dumpster
to haul the stuff away,
to incinerate, or landfill
under tons of earth.

Or end up in some trendy shop
selling vintage treasures,
in which everything once belonged
to a small apartment
where someone else’s frail parents

insisted on staying. 

Where I can't help but see
dead people's old belongings.

We know how foolish it is
to attach ourselves to stuff,
to bric-a-brac, and kitsch
nostalgic tchotchkes.
But still, we cannot part.
Because unreliable as memory can be

secrets, and intimacies
are embedded in things.
Objects hold meaning
no one else can see.

Except when we're gone.
When our flimsy shelter’s bull-dozed down
to earth, and rock,

the small apartment stripped
closets clear-cut.
And our precious artifacts
incidentally lost.

Roz Chast is a New Yorker cartoonist. Her most recent graphic memoir is Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (her emphasis). I read an excerpt several months ago in the magazine, and found it deeply touching, bittersweet, funny. Today, she was interviewed on Q. The memoir is all about her elderly parents’ dwindling old age and eventual death. Part of it is about their attachment to their place and things, even though they were well past managing. And part is about how it fell to her, the only child, to deal with a well lived-in apartment crammed with stuff.

Coincidentally, I also just finished listening to the newest RadioLab podcast, which was on the subject of Things, and featured a story about a candy egg someone had carted around with him for over 40 years:  its sentimental value, and how he coped with its unexpectedly breaking.

Since, on top of all this, I just returned from my elderly parents’ place in Toronto, the subject seemed especially present. Their place isn’t especially cluttered. At least not the sort of clutter that involves piles of junk covered in dust. (My mother never liked anything out of place, and still doesn’t.) But cluttered in the sense of lots and lots of tchotchkes:  little decorative pieces my mother collects; tastefully displayed but filling every surface. And the usual piles of quickly leafed-through magazines. All her little treasures, that no one else would value. In the end, it will seem like a kind of a betrayal, disposing of it all.

I like leading a minimalist life, and have little interest in material things. Yet all this had me reflecting on how stuff has piled up, living in the same house for 30 years. It seems I’m travelling heavy, despite my best intentions.

So it was the intersection of all this that led me to reflect on all the stuff we accumulate, what it means to us, and its eventual fate. And led, inevitably, to a poem.

Genius Baby
June 1 2014


The two men, in a language I didn't understand
were loud.
A foreign tongue is always hard
on the ear,
a mouthful of consonants, contorted vowels.
I heard pure sound, no hint of meaning.
And not a single word;
like random letters, on a printed page

no blank space.

So even the dullest man
was a genius baby,
lying in his crib
ears honed, eyes alert,
discerning patterns of words
from senseless noise.
A brilliant window, flung open
in the first few years,
when brain cells are piling on, synapses crackling
like an electrical storm.

Not tools, or opposing thumbs
but our mother tongue
that makes us human.

And me, a grown man
of some intellectual accomplishment,
unable to cut through the noise.

Some Slavic language
that sounds like argument,
embellished by hands, and stance, and flashing eyes.
Except they laugh
and clap each other's back
and walk away smiling,
their secret handshake

still undecipherable.

I thought I grew up smarter,
but just a few years old
and that open window

cranked shut,
my hearing blunted
mind made up.

The acquisition of language is the most complex and challenging intellectual task we'll ever accomplish. That pudgy, helpless, and seemingly passive baby, lying supine in her crib, is actually a genius, her mind buzzing with purpose and work. That growing brain is a formidable instrument, making sense out of what to any sensible adult would sound like random noise. It is plastic and fecund, while the adult brain is pruned and rigid.

We are shaped at a young age, and to some extent prisoners of our early years. Experience may give us short-cuts and processing speed ("heuristics", the cognitive scientists call them); but it also tends to lead us to the same predictable ends.