Daughter

My answer to the good and bad shocks of life has always been to write about them, maybe years down the road as an experience shaded to fit some character I am writing about. Recently my daughter Jennifer, who battled encephalitis and coma for her very life, was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, an insidious and incurable systemic disease I have battled for 35 years, more than half my life. Occasionally poetical with words, not at all a poet, this is what emerged about passing things on.

                 Daughter

  

She comes to visit limping across the yard

along uneven areas of grass and gravel,

favoring her stiff knees, twisting left hip

to swing her leg out to avoid bending it,

every ginger step at the corners of her eyes

as wrinkles appearing and smoothing quickly,

stamped like the beating of her heart.

Smiling, raising wrapped hand, greeting

her mother near the small plum tree snowy

in first bloom, hugging, bound hand on

her mother’s back, another hard-earned smile

and allowing her face to be touched, studied.

Turning body with stiff neck, flashing eyes,

quickly a gritty smile, nodding to her father

on the deck, he lifting a beer, remembering.

The porch steps, the onset, tears in big eyes,

pain-rendered with questions, greeting

dying in his throat, his own swollen hands

little help, useless joints, fingertip sparks

transmitting traits and quirks and bumps,

eye and hair color and skin tone to kin,

the family body made manifest, her spirit

fired at times mixing spirits, locked cells

behind brave new faces, love and fear

constant companions, the gravity of living.