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 our reach, 
and, though he’s only five, it’s loss that drives him 
to the words, trying to pick out his own name 
among whatever is 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 — lluv luve yur broder jacob.