For Anna

You’re off.
I wept in spectacles
Wordless to enwisen you.
Probed for proverbs, I’m found without.
Believe me, I did nothing unintentionally.
If I thought it helped you, my pebble whipped up waves.
If I sinned, the boulders dropped without a ripple.
Avoiding cliche is not enough
Though these too were one time precious tropes —
The bird from the nest, a maiden voyage,
the oarage of wings —
Not because I discount your flight
But because birds are better parents.
They have a beak full of tasks and work them well —
Warm hatchling
Worm nestling
Waive fledgling.
Such precise timing offers no
Locus standi for the fallen.
I have metastatic regrets
Myth-sized
For gaping gaps and
Those I plugged over
Extenuated
Those you fell in, can’t fill, or clawed free from.
Funny, maybe as much of you formed
from your mother’s feats
as in my failing.
When bits of kid were snatched
You reached forward
Found resource, unwrapped resolve.
Your childhood fell that way
When I was derelict
And now I’m whining for your play
Your pointing out the silly page in a picture book
Your stubborn rejection of perambulation
Eating mud-pies
Incarcerating your older brother
For acts I’ve enshrined.
I erect monuments where once I razed your youth
Where I caused the pain.
Hummingbirds to eagles
Go egg to wing equipped with analgesics
And make us envy how breezy-brained
They wield the atmosphere.
My dear one
Don’t soar!
Arrogance sprouts quills.
Don’t grip the arboreal crag
Where air is your nearest neighbor
And everything nature is normal.
I’d rather you overpack
Not to overwhelm but to keep you tracking
With aches that preamble the tiny joys
You bead together, wear lightly —
Pain that erases childish caricatures
To paint the ambiguous, untimely, and just.
I praise
Your emergent self
Too old for texts and tweets
Too soulful
Only half-full in a moment with a hundred
visions
indecisions
and revisions
before a chilled Chai tea
With time enough to opt
For a different day.
Whatever way you get your head to pillow
Right before the sleek and slinking ether
Think how human it was, how human will be —
Regretting, accepting, forgetting, resetting.
There’s nothing wrong with circles.
That’s how we run most races.
That dear soul of yours has moved and
always will go profitably.
Up or down.
Deep and Wide and Tall.
I trust you.
You see how the qui e malo bonum facit
makes creator out of you through me.
You grew it, composting my hit and miss.
Excitedly I await your movements,
Dance and Symphony.
Enjoy every sandwich, I agree with you —
The ones you make and eat yourself
The ones you make for others
The ones you make and give away.
The ones that others make you.
Don’t refuse a bite of crust or the
baguette spread with prosciutto and fig
But remember
No one ever put poison in a poor man’s dough.
Enjoy the hospitality, both guest and host.
And I?
Daily I will pray, hearty like a saint, for you.
I will mow through many photographs
Ever wonderstruck at how
2 eyes could ever peer so
2 cheeks could ever laugh so
1 mouth could ever pout so
1 face could ever shine so
One woman could ever be so.
