A VISIT FROM THE WUNDERKIND

This Sausalito toddler flies into Gaspereaux

announcing he’s a fan of Husserl and Heidegger

and is now a junior phenomenologist determined

to be here and now with all five senses fully awake.

His oversize eyes scrutinize the Times over a breakfast

of Cheerios and waffles with two kinds of jellies.

“Global warming is real. Ignore the deniers!” he cries.

He contemplates the pros and cons of Intelligent Design

and is enchanted by the Tao Te Ching as he draws

a black and white symbol of the Ying and Yang.

To unwind he madly dances up and down, flapping arms,

wiggling and jiggling his booty like a disco dancer,

a slave to the rhythm with four to the floor.

A serious student of litarchur, he puzzles over William Blake,

pages and pages of neologisms in “Finnegan’s Wake”

and the opacity of “The Emperor Of Ice Cream.”

After reading “A Glimpse Into Nothingness,” he meditates

on the abode of vacancy. Floating along in aquatic stillness

he gazes at the splendor of a blue heron standing erect

and motionless, a pastel form against a wash of water and sky.

In a cacophonous clack and squawk it flies to its mate guarding

the overhead nest in a hush of whispering Tamarack trees.

He then rambles along the shore skimming rocks into the bay

again and again and again, scooping up schools of silver

sticklebacks that flip-flop on the sand. He pokes a stick in every

dormant jelly fish, pockets a carapace of a crab, starfish and lobster

claw for show and tell. He pees on a giant ant hill, watching ants

drop their loads and run away in disarray. He collects ants, black

and red, dropping into his basket a baby copperhead.

Before climbing into bed he concentrates on quadratic equations,

figuring out how to give the isosceles triangle a different slant.

Falling asleep he ponders the dimensions of infinity

and the ramifications of hermeneutic exegesis.

Asleep, he dreams his favorite Haiku:

No sky at all;

No earth at all-and still

The snow flakes fall.

Milton P. Ehrlich