Eidetic Web - 20151216

There are moments as a father where you realize you have to let go

Not in the normal ways of aging involving freedom or independence

Allowing a daughter to fail for the sake of earning knowledge through error,

But letting go knowing there is no replacement for certain experiences

There are indelible events in a lifetime affirming butterfly wings

Beating winds round hemisphere to scour oceans for organisms

Willing to recognize the differential in temperature

Heat created and energy distributed by the very act of growth

There are moments as a father where you realize you have to let go

To be back, not out of better for anyone, but because the pain you feel

In the absence of that person bearing your genetic material

Of witnessing that growth is an egoistic gift on one wing

A woman needs both to fly and a father cannot put that weight upon

Such a delicate appendage silk-like baring adolescence from the chrysalis

Bleeding enough into this world and a father has to bind his tongue into books

Poetry and a nightfall of seven minutes to a Superdome full of a nation of girls

Spectating a national soccer team, world-cup, last-night end of tour

With another step-of-a-man because seating locations refused to be divulged

Invitations were not offered and the first time a man taught you to kick a ball at your shadow

On fence boards at four and half years old no one was there to see you but me

I got that day and he gets this one; and all the others

Me being in my New Orleans and your mother having her farmed theater root

The onions, bell pepper, and celery and the red beans of a bowl

The two of us at a table quietly in an otherwise empty house two weekends a month

Eleven years old, you and me for seven, not what it looks like, but what it is  

A game, a field, grass in a building carted in, carted out

I keep a pile of all the moments and days you live, that I am not able to be there to see

Usually there is a shadow veiled over the lot, makes it easier to imbibe

Tonight I can picture where you are; I can feel how close

It is like the universe is vibrating in discord and I am trying to hold it still

What it means to love, to exist, to be, to bear witness to another human

Unfold, evolve, recollect and hold specific moments of youth in eidetic web

That as a sexagenarian marching in to help your father in an assisted living center

Seeing the string of what shapes tonight won’t be in there 

You’ll probably be fine, I may be ok, but there is just so much missing