That Sting
 

My daughter runs to me and pulls back
her auburn hair. Golden stars in her ears.
"No worse than a bee sting," she says. Then
runs off. Already she wants more to do with
tomorrow, less to do with me.
Yesterday I heard that fingernails reach
eighteen feet if we let them.
Imagine the potential filth of teeth.
Animals again. Prettied up or not,
we’re exorbitantly proud
of our ability to reason and to suffer
(e.g. to feel regrets). How much I’ve missed
already. How long my daughter’s hair
by now would wave good-bye.

I should have been at the mall today
signing those papers her mother signed
as, through Kaylee’s two
too tender lobes, a stranger’s cartilage-gun
punched holes. Stung by a bee? Nonsense
she couldn’t have come up with on her own. Yet
adults nodded and said, "It’ll be OK." So now
I play the daddy-fool who wishes it could be
better than OK, offering a pittance of protection
from those fool-filled years to come, waiting
propitiously for the aftersting.
Why should I be surprised? In time
all kinds of natural forces bore
holes even through stone.

With each step my daughter takes
away from me, hoarse winds and supple rains
approach. An entrance to a spelunkable cave?
Or a pair of oceans already drowned inside her
shell-ears? When was she ever stung by anything?
Time eases, not a bit, the pain.
Whistling through. Enlarging
each tiny absence. Never fully draining away.
Meanwhile I’m afraid
she won’t accept my offer to help her choose. To stop
the dike with costume diamonds.
To wait for the real thing. To go natural
and wake to piercings we falsely claim
have (sooner than we thought) healed shut.  

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"That Sting" was previously published in The Comstock Review.  

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William Rudolph, who completed his MFA in Poetry at Vermont College, has also studied poetry under Edward Hirsch at Breadloaf and Jane Mead at The University of Iowa. His poetry has appeared in The Nebraska Review, Quarterly West, Rattle, Rosebud, The South Dakota Review and many other print publications; these are the first poems he has had published in an online journal.
 

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