What Daddies Do

Yes, it's true. I've made a mess of this jigsaw puzzle world. Pieces are missing and other frayed by neglect or broken by breaking news.

I was raised with cross ventilation and now the air is noxious. I am shouting on the rooftop into a miasma. The planet is febrile. Beyond the reach of alcohol rub. My father repaired my world and now I must do the same for my three daughters. This is what Daddies do.

I won’t let the orange tide be pulled by a lunatic moon. Your sandcastles will endure. Once erected they are untouchable.

I shall don my pharmacist smock and descend to a subterranean laboratory with its smoking cauldron. Add a feather of dove, eye of newt, pluck wild berries, some rough-hewn bark and the root of aromatic abracadabra.

I’m remembering how my father healed my universe. Tapping a crystalline power on one side of the torsion scale, adding a grain or scruple on the other. He achieved an equipoise yet he also allowed himself to grind fascists into dust in his mortar and pestle. Vehemence and gentility in equal measure. May I bequeath that to you.

If this was a torn page of history, I would use my glue stick. If a table fell apart, I’d get my toolkit, even read the damn manual since these are no ordinary times. If that doesn’t work, I’ll find a bridge to Portugal or Costa Rica and I will lay me down.

There is something you have beyond the reach of polls and poles. That space, that room of your own, your orchard or riverfront of your own composition. There you will meet yourself and form a circle of like minds and hearts.