To Nicholas Doiron Macaluso in the Pre-World of Beginning

Still night, the stars begin to turn, waver
as if in friendly departure from dawn's approach.

Our vision outdistances Time - I see signs
of radiance perhaps gone.  And yet, we scatter

wishes in words through the galaxy, pinpointing one,
often not the brightest, but that seems to be ours,

specifically tuned to receive our dreams.  I see you
before light knows your face or Time has swept breath

you've exhaled into the room to move through memories.
The whole of you is warm and the warmth of you is whole

in a red world of muffled music and voices, the beat
of your heart echoed by the beat of your mother's.  It is

late July and in six weeks time small acorns, now green and bright,
will grow brown and hold a lovely low shine by day.  At night,

if the moon is right, a patina starshine may slide among them and summer
owls hoo-hoo the stillness that is never truly still.   And you

will enter our lives, as if you haven't always been there, since
life began.  You see, sometimes I believe we are a world within

worlds happening over and over again.  I see my grandmothers inside
their mothers' wombs, and me inside mine, and rings of life, generations

like ripples within ripples, like rain drops, intermittent on a green lake.
The circles go out to meet other circles and the water of life

goes on.  I see you now in a world colored pink, day
penetrating your mother's skin to light up the lessening space

where you once floated with such ease.  And I see you with me
and the sky is pink and we drink lemonade at a table in the shade.

I see you finding a first blackbird in the sky, the first crow,
the first feel of prickly grass on bare feet.

What will we speak of when we talk?  The heat in the color
of red bougainvillea?  The sun as a morning star?

Whatever words come, will come.  There are zoos
and elephants to meet.  There are parrots

who may learn to say our names, sea glass to gather
from sands left behind by low tides, kites to build and fly. 

Dawn opens again, mid-summer honest as it warms
the young acorns, and from six hundred miles

north, I see you turn inside your mother.  She moves
a hand there, to that place where some part of you stretches

and all is pink light and well in your world and all is
pink light and well in mine, Nicholas.  All is well in mine.