A benediction of starling breath 

through Gianna’s bedroom curtain 

stirred her father’s dim blue thoughts 

that nearly summer evening 

Gianna might have watched for him 

through a chain of cotton eyelets

Mama tapped the glossy portrait,

the soft receiving blanket 

her Daddy still as stone

She only knows he couldn’t breathe

Soothed by kitchen voices 

Gianna dreams in lightyears

sighs an origin of tessellations

drops into vaporized

nitrogen fixing redwoods

patients 80 years unborn

treasure her hand-me-down quarks

She never asked to be a scion

Grown, to trip daily over

new apertures into his death

Grown, her face will find his in the streets

Now sugar spins cobweb galaxies

double pendulums elbow room 

in chain reacting spacetime

She’ll be a doctor a mogul forgotten

the country’s measurement

how far we have yet to go

Her mother smooths the blanket

the child's only undertaking

dreams in roller coaster velocities

her father's sun-warmed shoulders

her father

to breathe out the sun