These fontanelles of your skull won't close
for eighteen months; until then the bones remain
separate plates — frontal, parietal, occipital,
temporal, sphenoid — your concave spinal column
cannot hold. But instead of feeling helpless

when you sense the world outside yourself
and how little you can do, have faith in the world
of your head. Inside there, your skill bones work
to grow together, like the tectonic plates of the earth
in reverse, suturing and shaping as you evolve.

Your head, unlike the earth that sculpts mountains
to the sun, deepens dark grooves within
the brain's hemispheres to hold skeins
of butterflies inside, to show you oceans
and peninsulas without your even opening
your eyes. How different it will be there

from here, where pieces pulled apart until Africa
and Asia hoarded the elephants, and the penguins
clung to a single pole; where we harvest
the pods and seeds of the only spices we can grow,
then send them away in ships, with translators.

When your head is whole with fibrous joints
at the end of these eighteen months, think
how proud some cell in you somewhere will be,
of how its chemical impulse made again

a world with one country, a humming garden.
with the first cervical vertebra, the atlas,
strong enough to hold it all upright.