In case you missed it, last week was an interesting one in Boston. So I wrote about it over at DadCentric. Check it out.

Hi! It's me! With one of those annoying cross-post link... things. Yeah. Awesome.

So! I wrote something new over at DadCentric. You should probably go read it.

I'll even provide you with a helpful link: A To Fade In.

Click it! Go ahead! It's fun for the whole family! Except for the fun part!

Exclamation points!

!!!

For as long as you are young
and I can still know the comforts of you, kitten-curled into the
hollowed crook of my arm, wrapped in blankets and nettles —
your warm brown eyes and the barbed tail of your tongue,
even in these tender
days a rapier in your small and unseasoned hands —
watching me watch you
unpuzzling the world
revealing an infinite core of strange and
wondrous half-truths, half-lit
in this low December sun

your legs drawing up
against your chest,
your body a tight ball of sinew
and bone, muscle and joy

I will be astonished
at the arc of years that carried you
from the first moment you lay cradled
along the length of one forearm
your sister balancing the other
weight and counterweight and
the world shifting on its axis
gravity losing its hold
as those illusions I'd treasured as truths
slipped, unbound and
forgotten
in the rush of discovering all
the new commandments
that might hold me fast and
settle into my skin as carved
promises on concrete,
whispered prayers of surrender to

these fleeting moments and long years of
long summer days and quiet nights, cicada-songs
and the steady rasp of air rushing from your
strong lungs, keeping steady metronome time
two, three, four
tracing the slow arc of the moon across the sky
crescent to crescent, harvest to
hidden

holding you tight,
feeling you slip away

with each steady tick to a world I
dream wondrous but
fear will not love you as you deserve to be loved.

I hope that in this, too, I will be wrong.
That for as long as the sharp crescent of your smile
draws wide, draws wry,
draws the tides from shore to distant shore
that for as long as these slow, soft rays
of fading late December sun
glow, then linger, then fade
that my eyes can rise to the horizon
across the growing dark and

there find you, at last,
the risen star:
ascendent, rippling with light,
distant and perfect
your song the slow brush of moonlight against
cascades of icicle, practiced fingers finding home at each
rain-captured key
each sweet note cold and pure and perfect
across these weightless hours, as dark air sparks alight
with sudden butterfly paths of snowfall,
tumbling
twisting soaring
catching your light
vibrating in perfect tune - brittle tips quivering in delight at
each chord and chorus, each shimmering harmonic
and collapse to minor key -
your voice a signature written across the sky

and I will remember, in some small corner of my
small heart,
this moment
when you were as you are now:
curled and comforted and entirely
at home,
wrapped in blankets and the weight
of my hand upon yours.

In what can only be described as an egregious error in judgment, the good people at Babble have once again - inexplicably - decided to include me among far more deserving writers in their annual "Top 50 Dad Blogs" thing. They also named my comrades-in-DadCentric as the #1 group dad blog, and #4 site overall. Which is pretty badass, in all honesty.

Hell: they even put me in the Top 10 for "Most Confessional" and "Best Written." Which... wow.

So. What can we learn from this? I think the lesson is clear: with enough procrastination, run-on sentences and pointless blue lobster references... anything is possible.

::throws confetti::

FYI: I posted something new over at DadCentric today — South and East of Newfoundland.

Thus endeth the update.

 

</annoying cross-post>

I have known you from the moment you first drew breath, shared each halting footfall and marked each great, bounding leap as your winged feet stepped into the air and your arms lifted to the sky, a gentle bird of prey rising with the winds and soaring, unencumbered, over a landscape of glittering emerald and depthless sapphire blues. Your heart beating massive and strong in your chest, thrilling to these new velocities and the impossible freedoms of discovery: a whole world, filled with wonders, waiting to be explored.

The currents carving deltas of cloud through your hay-blonde hair, the moon-sliver crescents in your cheeks deepening and broadening as your face draws back into a smile – your default response to each subtle shift of the sun – as these smooth curves buffer the sharp angles of your mind, probing, instinctively searching out the offbeat and focusing on those unexpected moments of strange joy

the trees alive with your laughter, the staccato beats of one smooth note bouncing off the next, a rhythm to a song whose words I’ve never known but have loved with all my weak heart: jealously, helplessly, enraptured in the sudden knowledge that among these sweet sugar maples and restless pines I could be haunted by

these glimpses of you, flickering between the leaves, reaching for the distant moon, racing toward unseen horizons

and before I can begin to realize the moment has passed, that moment I might have held you in my arms and warmed to the full strength of your gaze, your infinitely warm eyes bright with the everpresent spark of mischief and precocious compassion, filled with the echo of your tumbling laughter and infinite capacity to find such great happiness in such small things, allowing myself the lie that there, with you, I might be enough

you are beyond me, beyond my understanding of what slender hopes this life might offer, beyond the weight of these heavy years and the weight of these memories, these fears, these long days and lengthening nights

you are a whispered word, a half-remembered psalm, my breath finding form in these cold hours before dawn, shifting and twirling and lifting away

rising with the winds and soaring

to where heaven might be.

 

Somewhere in the fading of hours, lost to the restless tumbling of cool and rain-swept November days, one to the next, we stood - together, outside my parents' home - and watched another grey day begin a grateful, graceful collapse into a long, rain-swept evening. You, standing in the open door of your old white Honda, long and pale and pretending not to shiver, or notice the thin cascade of cool water running along the sides of your cheeks and tracing the arcs of your long fingers and capable hands, swirling cautiously through the intricate axis of skin gracing each fingertip as though navigating a maze and searching for a way home, absorbing the subtler salts of your skin and recalling the taste of the sea. Your eyes huge, luminous, each long blink a revelation of blues blending to greys, flashing brighter with hints and suggestions of azure and lapis, cooling to the patience of slate, steadily blinking away the trembling droplets of water that gathered along the edges of your dark lashes before leaping, not looking, to the freedom and fleeting joys of a moment in flight: unburdened by regret or purpose, still vivid with the memory of your warmth, spinning and twisting in unsteady currents of free air and waiting for the tender embrace of gravity to take hold and deliver, at last, sweet release.

A sky, darkening in quiet increments, framing this little world.

And I, feeling each catch in my breath, savoring this growing suspension of disbelief - unexpected, unanticipated, treasured and fragile, stretching across the steady passage of months in defiance of all sense and logic - and struggling to surpress the instinctive, furious vacillation between caution thrown to the wind and the constant, breathless terror of waiting for the wrong word, the false step, the hidden flaw suddenly brought to light that would bring this intricate construct of hope tumbling into chaos and shattered glass. Mindless of the rain, the cold, the winnowing of moments as you stood there in the open door, poised on the cusp of our time and the infinite stretch of time and space beyond... incapable of holding back and denying myself the joy of you: your ready laugh, your nimble mind, your ambition and curiosity and horrible taste in music and inexplicable willingness to waste your time and energy on such a hopeless cause, such a ridiculous figure, such an unworthy beneficiary. Hanging on the nuance of your words, the wicked glimmer in your eye, the unspoken prayer for this and every moment with you to linger, to last, to lead to another and another and 

the rain, falling harder, the sky darkening, the moment drawing to a close and

my eyes, dropping in acquiescence, acknowledging the inevitability of the fading day and the moment passing and struggling to find the words, the excuse, for there to be another - another day, another night, another chance to bask in the glow of distant suns and warm myself in the belief that a life like this might be mine - while you waited patiently for me to fumble my way through the process and grant you leave, offering kind words and knowing glances and gentle suggestions, and I half-listened and half-scrambled to find the phrasing that would strike you right and grant me the gift of one more smile, one more small laugh, and you said something and

I misunderstood

and the world exploded into sound and brilliant light, chimes and chorales, a surging within me of entire oceans flooding into brittle chasms and spilling out in furious overflow, overwhelming me with a sense of urgency and relief and joy, joy, joy beyond all reckoning, inchoate and hapless and infused with gratitude and disbelief and wonder (sheer, gorgeous wonder) that such a thing might happen to someone like me, and that all I'd been bottling up inside was not wrong or wrong-headed: it was going to happen and after so, so, so very long it was happening and suddenly I could not contain it and suddenly there was no reason to, and without looking I leapt - smiling in my broken, awkward way as the words came unbidden, unbowed and unabashed - "I love you, too."

And you smiled, and I did not notice because all the light and joy in the world was flooding out of me at impossible volumes and velocities, I did not notice that there was something curious in your smile, something I could not name, and then I started laughing and you laughed, too, a bit more quietly than me, and 

we stood there together, in the rain, laughing and then laughing some more and then I leaned across the top of the car door and hugged you, full and firm, my heart bursting through my chest and that cold rain filling my eyes and I held you tight and it felt like holding the sun because, because, because of all that

I'd thought you'd said. 

It is a sad and terrible world,

driven and destined to break the best of us in the most terrible ways

and the rest of us, crippled at birth, left helpless to

the whims of the relentless tide and the slow, pitiless

passage of days,

can only watch

and wait

as the moments wither and the foundation erodes until

we can no longer remember the moment we

took that first wrong step.

It does not pause to take note

of our slender hopes, our tender ambitions, these

brittle dreams like dry leaves that

blow apart and scatter

as the warm days fade to fall.

But in the ways your brown and blue eyes catch this

light

and bend it, a spectrum drifting beyond the visible, into

gentler hues that

lend credence to the songs and stories we’d known

when we

once upon a time

were small enough to believe this world offered promise and

wonder that defied imagination, twisted the laws of

physics and suggested that in the slivers of light that slip

between these heartbeats and bend

upon themselves, blending each soft flutter of eyelash and

whispered prayer into a cumulus

of possible – of impossible made real –

I find the capacity to believe

there is something worth believing in

 

• • •

 

- for my daughters -

My twin daughters are rapidly coming up on their 7th birthday. As they have a boatload of aunts, uncles and grandparents eager to festoon them with gifts, they've been asked to compile birthday lists.

With that in mind, yesterday one of the girls provided me with the following:

Please note: the second item is intended to translate as "giant animal." Ahem.

Sorry — this is another one of those annoying cross-posts where I don't actually create anything fun or productive but instead point you toward something I wrote somewhere else.

::throws confetti::

If you follow me on Twitter (and really, you should — I'm quite charming in 140 characters or less) you may recall a fun-filled trip to the local ER that my daughter and I took a couple of months back. Well... I wrote about it today over at ye olde DadCentric. Please feel free to go forth and check it out 'n whatnot.

That's it! Nothing more to see here! GO BACK TO YOUR HOMES!

::drops mic; walks offstage::