Given Time

I have never written about my father without 
saying my father is dead. My daughter
will reach the last age he reached this fall. 
I have doubled his time—tell me, what 
does that mean? There is an old joke:
What do you get when you divide 
crumbs? More crumbs. What is time
but time, evanescent, air, frail hummingbird 
disappearing green, its whirring wings, 
blurred chirp? I have walked with my daughter
across the Pont Neuf, the Left Bank of the Seine, 
heat that made us both sweat. We did not mind;
we were father and daughter in Paris, going to lunch, 
ordering wine on the patio while other diners smoked, 
and the butter on the bread was luminous, salty.

At the lake here in Utah, a dead pelican rose from salt 
near the Spiral Jetty. I had seen four white pelicans 
fly into dusk-colored clouds above Antelope Island
before, and now, I see one sprawled against the salt-frost, 
its still body. Its wings bend into a chevron,
ajar, one hundred feathers, each wing fanned 
toward each direction the sun ran. The bird’s eyes 
collapsed into mute black seeds, its beak 
wandering from its body, drab yellow, arrow
with no hunger left. Being has its detail, every tuft 
shadowed blue, rimmed gold, even the dirt catching
light, rose breath, lilac, lemon, blue. I give the coin to the vendor.

I take, but I cannot keep. My daughter orders espresso 
after lunch, the water glass sweating and luminous
in the shade of the awning. My double life fills
with birds and daughters growing into the world, growing 
into their lives. These crumbs given, I take onto my tongue 
taste, and the brain takes the momentary flavor.
The heart takes nourishment, one thing lit by circuit,
a brief flicker some minor god may witness and say Look, 
it is happening again, that shimmer, so close, so small.

Read more from Issue 16.2.