Mirabelle is a Precocious Seven Year Old I Babysit...

I think her mother believes that all gay men have the "nurturing gene."

I suppose she hasn't seen me returning from the liquor store with a bottle of Canadian whiskey in the front seat console and a young nephew seated next to it. When forced to suddenly brake because another driver has run a STOP sign, my hand will always protectively fly out.

To the bottle.

But don't judge too quickly.

Children need to prove their Darwinian fitness just like everything else on the planet. Just ask the DISCOVERY CHANNEL.

But I must say that young Mirabelle is an exception for me.

When it comes to child prodigies, I have a certain soft spot in my heart.

Here, I think, is a child who can reckon my greatness.

Anyway, yesterday I watched Mirabelle for part of the day and I noticed she was drawn to the computer again, and retreating into her fantasy world of 38 double-D avatars (her mother said "it's fine") and I felt the poor child was being deprived of real culture, the nobler arts like painting and poetry.

So I dragged her away from the insidious Google box and begged her indulgence in listening to some poetry.

After some protestations to the contrary that lasted seventeen minutes, she smiled--or affected a smile--and indulged me. (I believe the five dollars which she extorted "to be used only for books!" helped.) She plopped herself down on the kitchen floor. Well, at first she did have her arms splayed, elbows on knees, her palms supporting her grimacing face which had become a nesting place of sulkiness. But she was at last and at least the captive audience for which modern poetry has such a hankering.

So I began by reciting some W.H. Auden, which elicited an ambiguous response of arm waving and what I believe was sarcastic eye-blinking.

I figured I'd try some Robert Duncan, and I read her the poem dedicated to his mother. The falconry poem. I think Mirabelle might have gleaned some superior wisdom (only accessible to children) as she seemed to begin making vatic sounds with her lips, assisted by her fingers. I told her that reminded me of the use of the sistrum in ancient rituals, and began to explain in meticulous detail.

I noticed by the time I had finished the Duncan poem that Mirabelle had found and opened a container of wooden blocks left here over the holidays by a family member with wee ones.

Mirabelle was enough inspired by poetry to begin exploring language's physicality and plasticity! I felt a warm inner glow of satisfaction!

Realizing I might have a young Robert Grenier or bp nichol on my kitchen floor, my voice increased in volume and I daresay a glow of pride flushed through my lineaments.

I decided to really go there, to challenge her image-sodden young brain with some of the most challenging writing of the century we have just vacated. I read to her from Zukofsky's A; I bruited Kurt Schwitters; I pantomimed Jackson Mac Low's dances in language.

Clearly Mirabelle was experiencing a spiritual remove.

She was deeply engrossed in the blocks, the tactility of language, ironically stepping back to jump forward by using these amusements for babies. She was working as feverishly as Kenneth Goldsmith with a copy of The New York Times.

After a good two hours of reading to my young charge, I noticed Mirabelle had become drowsy, so I helped her upstairs to begin a well-earned nap.

I must say I had to congratulate myself on having helped to redirect one child away from the cyber-lotus land of the meaningless play of symbols, and having started her back upon her odyssey towards the real Ithaca of the soul we all crave.

Several hours later, Mirabelle's mother picked up the sleeping child and thanked me profusely for my simple guardianship (little guessing what boon of culture I had shared with the appreciative child!).

It was only an hour or so later when I was passing through the kitchen that I happened to glance down and see Mirabelle's last tactile reworking of language, her bold experiment in haptic poetry, that most extreme manifestion of the verbo-visual art.

I reproduce it above, with this post, though I can't really glean what the young artist is saying.

I only know that poetry, like milk, does a young body good!