Javier

There is a certain magic you can catch
in the spark of someone's eye
that I am sure, someday,
he will see in his daughter's
when she eagerly wraps her fingers
around her first lightning bug.

By then, my enervated bones
shall pave the roads his soul walks on
with the dust from my ashes,
but I still remain hopeful.

Sometimes, on a properly bright day
she'll twirl in the evening sunlight
in my old high heels the way I did.
(I'm not sure that she'll ever grow enough
to be able to step in and fill my shoes.)

He'll cradle her face the same way he does mine,
I imagine. There is sometimes a tenderness
that contracts his pupils as if the notion
of getting too close to someone was foreign.

Even then,
he'll have days where he will shy away
from the future like a doe eyed fawn
desperate to hang onto its optimism;
that gentle creature he sometimes
absentmindedly stuffs in his back pocket
that that begs him to not get hurt again
by the world.