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?