For Cassie
Rush home for dinner between a poetry reading and a public lecture on peace
and since Maylie is once again absent on one of her five-day sesshins sittings
I expect the kitchen to be deserted but no! Cassie fresh from her twenty-fifth birthday party
is there and sees right off a moment to pamper fixes some food while I relax
even though it may be we shall always be awkward there being more forethought
to the strangest arranged marriage than when father and daughter first look on each other
nothing those first years of whirlwind diplomat parties or canoe trips in the Laurentians
prepared us newlyweds for (the French pregnancy movie had counseled an energetic life)
a morning hike up a waterfall in the middle of the night a silent tight-lipped drive
and then suddenly Cassie five weeks premature no more than a 4.5 pound
baby koala in the palm of the nurse’s hand How many shocks in life
can there be like that one? never before had I felt responsibility for such pain
as your misery and rage emerging from the ether of surgery at six weeks
the months of colic you could only be pacified by long drives on country washboard
or the nurserybook moment behind the hill just this side of the Iron Curtain
geese crossing the cobblestones a screech of brakes and you still smaller than your bear
ended up at the bottom of a pile of cribclothes on the Peugeot backseat floor
pains I would like to blame for your subsequent anger and not those later years
of crisis meetings books that always brought me home at dinner time too late
to pass through the small door of your wonderland to be a good father
I tried hard to live a life without scandal in the end that too failed
along with that future I wasted your childhood on but tonight you make no issue of it
tonight some instinct remembers the long vigil in Warsaw the Vistula frozen and so
no water heat electricity by candlelight we clutched you through your hot terrifying fever
to the dull booms as they dynamited the ice or when our Peugeot skidded
in the Silesian snowstorm stopped only by the kilometer stone its back wheels hanging in space
Maylie’s sure hand scooping you without hesitation instantly out of the back seat
the same involuntary way Maylie’s flesh became your milk her hair straightened
and across her sweet breathing hara belly there appeared stretchmarks Once you had been born
we could no longer as before want only for ourselves just as now we must unlearn
that intense involvement which served to make us more sane than our earlier freedom
nothing like that unique response to my first glimpse of your half-alien redness
of being despite illusions of identity and choice no more than the outer flesh
of some buried seed whose great singlemindedness had for a brief generation
used us and our desire as it might yours and if this has not
informed me with the skill to put easily into words I love you
nevertheless I feel the gift of this added force the more gratifying
because unneedy breath delicate as the sparrow’s cough subtle as the earthworm trail
call me cassie or cassie’s dream but hold me close the style of language is indirect
sign for a sign sound for another sound