A Prayer for My Father

Here I am in a photo he took on the Japanese Bridge in Giverny
the summer I was seventeen, I think, my childhood friend Isabel
beside me as we pose against the railing under a cascade of wisteria
bustling overhead like purple and green ganja locks that make
a dangling fringe over us, our faces immobile and bored
even as phoebes hovered in white blooms of parachutes over
………………………………………………………………………………………….the oil-green pond.
“Nymphéas,” Papa told us the floating castles of lotus are called,
straining to provide highlights of information that would
cast these surroundings, redolent with the scents of flowers
and bursting with surfeits of plenty in a phenomenal light
of a mystic wisdom fused with earthly delight in this curated Eden.
He tries.  But the world he sees that he wants me, too, to see
lands flatly in my mind, overcast in the fog of his earnest will
so much it grays out like a digital terra incognita without
the beasts and dragons of a pre-Columbian cartography
but adorned with a plethora of webpage buttons I can’t click on,
the splash screen of that world not quite frozen yet unresponsive.
I don’t want to see the 10,000 things of his universe any more,
don’t want Paris or the Côte dʻAzur or even those fountains of lava
………………………………………………………………………………………………………..on his island
he wishes I would marvel at with him standing on a black sand shore
in his shorts and Locals flip flops, wind tugging at his baggy tee.
What do I want?  This trial to end, his incessantly amiable face to stop
scanning mine for the emotional paints heʻs brushed on it,
for the music on the car stereo to play something besides opera
………………………………………………………………………………………………………..and Dad rock,
for my own constellation of stories and stars to wheel above me
in a night sky of my own chosen travels, or in surprise
at the majestic unknowns yet to unfold as I tug them
with the grateful hands of these arms of mine reaching
…………………………………………………………………………………………..long years ahead.
I want him to know he has fulfilled all obligations to me,
that he is released from his paternal karma and all its sets
…………………………………………………………………………………………………of devotions,
that now he can lift his face to his own sun and moon,
the rise and fall of changes as clouds above the mountain
bring fresh rains upon the spreading fan of earth and ponds
radiant with fields of bending rice arrayed at his own feet.
Let him turn from me to his self-songʻs mysteries, throw the yarrow
stalks of his surmisals as divinations toward a singular future,
read the cracks in the burnt tortoise shell of Kīlauea
for new stories, for these late beginnings to his own earthly life.