everyone wants a piece of my little girl and they won’t leave her alone. They want to hold her close to their chests and hold her in their hands. They want to feel that something I feel when I hold her almost all in one hand and she bops her head up and briefly makes contact.
She sleeps legs curled up like frog in the center of my chest, face pressed into soft of my neck and her arms in splayed wide embrace. There is nothing like this in world, and they all want a piece of it. They want to feel it again and want to know what it feels like for the first time.
But she is mine and only ours and she’ll always be ours and we will always suffer for her, we will always feel a pang of despair when someone else picks her up and turns away from us with her in their arms
(My mother had done exactly this, our daughter was beginning to ball and I asked for her and supposedly my mother hadn’t “heard” me and turned away from my outstretched hands and my heart panicked)
First born, first cursed with all this anxiety and love and hope and fear. Ah my poor little one, would you have picked us if you knew what you were in for?
Every day of my life is getting quieter. Everyday of my life consists of a little more peace, a little less static, a little more music.

I became a father on March 4 @ 9:09PM and I really don’t know how to be one. I look at her now and especially when she is crying and I really don’t know what to do. If there has ever been a more pressing need to change, to change again how to approaching living, it is (again) now.
Cliches.
When could I have ever been ready to be a father. I know she only belongs, I look at her the way I contemplate the design of my hand. She is mine, mine as Morrison wrote in Beloved.
I would like to say that I moved (back again) to art, to making pictures with words, to making movement with words and lines, to making something out of nothing as I literally have in the quick breath and swell of skull and aged fingers of my daughter. Right here in front of me, this thing, breathing, demanding, crying, feeding, alive, alive, as if all of this has been a dream without resting, a dream without failure. I’ve been a lucky one, I’ve struck it rich with this woman who has endured me and endured with me.
From nothing something comes, a child plucked out of the womb, just like that, a rabbit out the hat. Don Byrd, “…a strange way to make humans.”
I need to write you and maybe the story of my life. I will need to write. I need to change (again) into something more, a father of all things. Would anyone have believed it?