Notes Made on an iPhone while Rocking My Son to Sleep, July 2011
by James Brush
How many times to sing “Redemption Song”? The first song I thought to sing him when he needed singing in the NICU. Some other parent sang nursery rhymes in curtained spaces with beeping monitors to metronome the time. Not knowing any rhymes, I went with Marley it stuck and now it’s ours. Quiet, now, he settles in to rocking my voice trails off to mumbles… this song of freedom…
Moonlight, thunder moon streaming in through the live oak, the passing hours marked by moonlight dropping down the blinds
The dogs dream their twitch-footed dreams, the squirrel finally caught — whimpers and low growls
The fan spins
beneath its spider shadow
ceiling jungle
Dim lines trace frames black pictures on the wall beyond the room… I can’t see them but I imagine what they might be — surely not the same images hung there years ago, not at this hour. They’ll have shifted become things I can’t conceive, ideas of things that can’t exist in morning light
Everything is strange now and somehow more easily understood
His breath slows against my shoulder, he sighs much like the dogs, and I watch the late minutes tick through this room of simplest dreams
James Brush is a teacher and writer. He keeps a full list of publications at his blog Coyote Mercury. He published his first poetry collection Birds Nobody Loves earlier this year. He lives in Austin, TX.
qarrtsiluni 
Lovely and evocative. It incited me to go and buy “Birds Nobody Loves”.
Fun to hear James read this as I read it silently. It showed me how much life exists in iPhone notes, which I’ve been making often for almost a year now in a far more random manner just to capture thoughts. The prose format of James’s iPhone notes somehow heightened the emotion I felt hearing the same notes read.
This is just wonderful. I knocked off at the end of a hard morning’s work and came here, to find myself feeling the warmth of a tiny baby, in a dark, hot night in Texas, hearing the endlessly haunting refrain of the song… wow thank you.