A life we treasured but could not protect.

This was the terror I could not confess—

Not even to my wife—and it was the joy

My daughter had no words to understand.

So standing at my pointless watch each night

In the bare nursery we had improvised,

I learned the loneliness that we call love.

IV.

But I gave up those vigils years ago.

My daughter’s seven now, and I don’t worry—

At least no more than any father does.

But waking up last night after the dream,

Trembling in the hall, looking at her door,

I let myself be drawn into her room.

She was asleep—the blankets softly rising

And falling with each breath, the faint light tracing

The sleek unfoldings of her long black hair.

Then suddenly I felt myself go numb.

And though you won’t believe that an accountant

Can have a vision, I will tell you mine.

Each of us thinks our own child beautiful,

But watching her and marveling at the sheer

Smoothness of skin without a scar or blemish,

I saw beyond my daughter to all children,

And, though elated, still I felt confused

Because I wondered why I never sensed

That thrill of joy when looking at adults

No matter how refined or beautiful,

Why lust or envy always intervened.

There is no tabula rasa for the soul.

Each spirit, be it infant, bird or flower,

Comes to the world perfected and complete,

And only time proves its unraveling.

But I’m digressing from my point, my vision.

What I meant to say is merely this:

What if completion comes only in beginnings?

The naked tree exploding into flower?

And all our prim assumptions about time

Prove wrong? What if we cannot read the future

Because our destiny moves back in time,

And only memory speaks prophetically?

We long for immortality, a soul

To rise up flaming from the body’s dust.

I know that it exists. I felt it there,

Perfect and eternal in the way

That only numbers are, intangible but real,

Infinitely divisible yet whole.

But we do not possess it in ourselves.

We die, and it abides, and we are one

With all our ancestors, while it divides

Over and over, common to us all,

The ancient face returning in the child,

The distant arms embracing us, the salt

Of our blind origins filling our veins.

I stood confused beside my daughter’s bed

Surprised to find the room around me dim.

Then glancing at the bookshelf in the corner,

I saw she’d lined her dolls up in a row.

Three little girls were sitting in the dark.

Their sharp glass eyes surveyed me with contempt.

They recognized me only as a rival,

The one whose world would keep no place for them.

I felt like holding them tight in my arms,

Promising I would never let them go,

But they would trust no promises of mine.