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This is where the love of language begins.

It’s something like learning you can crawl, or stand, or drum—

another discovery of your own powers. This, too, you can achieve:

someone else’s thoughts revealed, your own given force and form,

intention made motion like the big blue ball.

Is this also when you begin to perceive what I am going to tell you is called your “self,”

even though years later I may tell you

that I have become suspicious

of the truth of this idea?

I would hold you back from this, your first mistake of philosophy,

but I have no better mirror you might use instead.

And for now you have no such words as these. You have only begun

to claim your birthright of abstraction;

for now you tell me all done,

and milk which means get me Mommy,

and book, and Daddy; and of course, endlessly, you point.

And you make the sign for pick me up now,

which nobody ever taught you, and which

but for the thorny idea of

self

might be no abstraction at all.