Starts a memory—
Wren, my daughter, in her red dress
twirling against the sky on the horizon
of her kite string. Taut and cloudless, it lifts her
with the thinnest white.
Unwinding,

the outstretched finger of a god tethered to her body,
kept like a secret between her fists and the wind.
This could be the beginning or end
of everything.

Surely I must be dead,
watching with hollowed-out joy

my daughter’s perfect physics
reaping the late lawn of its light.
I want to give her my hand in place of the god’s—
the paper kite fleshed out against infinity,
her soundless wing telescoping through my distance.

I’m afraid I’ll never be as I once was.
Later, when she’s ready to change from her red dress,
I hear one, extravagant scream.
A wasp will fall from her sleeve, clean sting
in her armpit. I smash it as soon as it lands.

Wren can’t notice, in her screaming,
my coming back to life. Because
even in the making of this memory,

I must remind myself:

everything that is cruel
is also real.