You are floating away
in the balloon of your body,
your skin growing translucent,
your voice faint,
as the wide sky pulls you toward itself.
What can you see from there?
Is the view too vast to single me out
down here on the patchy grass?
So be it then.
I am letting go of what you were to me– father.
I am holding the film strip of my memories
up to the sky for the light to flood.
You were always more
than a sweatered chest for a small girl’s head,
than the jingle of change in your pocket
when deep in thought,
than the over-detailed maps you drew
to guide me on my way.
You were more too,
than your solemn moods
or the litanies of all those
writers in your head.
What you were in whole
I can no more know
than I can know what compels
the planets in their dutiful rounds,
or I can know myself.
For what am I?
A girl soon to be without a father,
or a balloon like you,
tied here, but filled with the same sky
that receives you now?
