Breakfast

Just yesterday the dawn light was blue, all blue, and it gleamed on the line of your brow, on the curve of your cheek, on the silver strands in your dark hair, and it made two tiny circles of brilliant blue light, Vega-light, Sirius-light, on your eyes, as you laughed. Then you stuck your tongue for a moment between your teeth. When you did suddenly a five-year-old girl looked out of your eyes, full of delight and wonder.

You sit by your Daddy in the cab of the pick-up truck, with your lunch pail on your lap, still and sleepy, and the warm air blows over your hands from the heater. Going hunting.

Your tongue diappears, and so does the five-year-old. The gleam and shadow shifts, and your eyes are looking into other countries, places I've never gone. I never watch you go without a tiny lift of terror. Will you come back? Why would you? (Watch the terror rise, and fall.) You come back, and your eyes are kindly, but full of news that can't be reported, histories that can't be translated. I watch you searching for a story that maybe I would be able to understand. Not easy. Maybe this?

We talk, and I watch your hands, hands that have driven pitons into cliff-walls, that have lifted teacups in Nepal, that I've watched flying over the keyboard of a laptop. Small hands. Hands that have seen some service. I don't reach for them. Not reaching for them is exhausting work.

And today the dawn light was blue, all blue, again. But it faded to the common gray of morning, and I was alone.