At eight months, she is half lake, half air,
floating as fragile as mist in her father's arms.
Startled by her sun-spangled eyes,
he sees in her blue irises
the waves rolling out of the West,
like the years already fixed and rolling out ahead.
Then her memory will be nil of this and her days will be filled
in the din and delight of an unknowable life to come.
The father wants this little girl to know that
in one swirling instant of an August afternoon in Lake Michigan
they shared their watery origins.
Fumbling as he tried to keep them both afloat,
he detected something familiar
in the angle of her nose and in the smooth
expanse of her forehead,
as he balanced every last one
of the child's cells and sighs.
On this day, in these,
her mother's Great Lake waters,
far from his Atlantic to the East,
for one blessed moment
all who had come before them,
generations heaped upon generations
strung out upon the crashing waves of Time,
kept tugging at them from the deep,
kept clutching at him for dear life.
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