For My Daughter on the Cusp of Twenty

I see in you a 2:00 a.m. face.

Amber light in a wing-back chair,

The talcum arc of rounded cheeks,

Coils of love vining an invisible wire.

I had yet to know we all remain infants.

Even as we grey, life casts us

Into washing machine blizzards,
Snapping limbs,

Marathon bombs and such.

How to explain—

In some way, you will always feel

Two, or seven or ten or nineteen.

At eighty-one my father said
He didn’t feel different

Until he looked in the mirror.

Now I understand.
I sit on the contoured cushion
of that aging chair,
while down a narrow hallway,
you sleep folded into yourself 

like a moth turned toward the wall.

Bound now by compound steel,
nothing is the same.
But nothing changes.

I know only that

You remain every age you ever were

On the path toward what you'll be,

Your nineteen as young as fifty-four,

Twenty as old as my ninety-three.