Something About Ducks

Across from me is a brick fireplace

reaching to the ceiling.  I hate staring

at bricks, so on the lone shelf sits a

pencil drawing my daughter produced

in high school when studying perspective.

In the foreground float six rectangles, Dali-esque.

The road is sketched in gray and white rectangles,

narrowing and lightening appropriately,

and in the distance beckons a city. 

This is my window, my daughter's lead.

I don't like cities any more than bricks,

but  the work is masterful in depicting

an impossible goal.  That city is like

the Emerald one, gleaming with fake forecasts

for lions, little girls, and men of straw.

Also, perhaps, for tin women whose hearts

are too hollow to embrace baked clay.

But wait; those seekers all got what they desired.

I'm confused now.

I remember her childish stick figures

with enormous faces and sloppy lopsided smiles.

At two, she drew a trunkless happy head

lolling in a dreamy Van Gogh sky.

Things were easier when my daughter was my only window

her sweet scent, downy hair, fair face,

her tiny hand circling my finger as we swished a swath

of tallish grass to feed some funky ducks,

way, way before her confounding prognostications.

Luckily, I have another daughter.

She'll be a scientist.

Her pronouncements will all be concrete,

like that which binds brick..

Copyright Julianza Shavin 2008