For the Fathers, and especially mine...

Since we received our referral, my thoughts have been consumed with knowing, understanding, and collating the never before felt emotions and feelings I have for this little girl. Just I as I posted before in having to remember there is no value for time in algebra, I need to remember my physic lessons as well. I told Amy one night I have so many swirls of feeling and emotions inside me,I know from whence they came, but I do not know what they are. I just know they are. But these new residents of my heart and soul have not displaced who lived there before. My soul has gained an immense mass, but the volumes has remains unchanged.

Most days I check the Poetry Foundation web site for the daily poem, but I have not in while (we were our of town most of last week). I finally found the words in the following quatrains for a new, swelling feeling I am experiencing: I am starting to feel more like a father than a son.

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

--Donald Justice