Two daughters and I choose
who gets the banana’s larger half.
I try like my own mom tried
to cut equal: the cake cut just so,
so that even inspecting our plates
parallel we might not argue but love
one another already and know
we were equals. I can picture
a hundred cakes consumed equally.
But holding the knife I wonder—
my younger one takes a run
at the word banana, “ANANA!”—
whether I can map my own kids’
days in the same symmetry. My own
fatherhood seems like an exercise in not
finding wisdom when I need it:
I see Solomon in sweatpants, knife
in hand, hovering over a single banana,
the women wailing in front of him.
We want our love to be exact. We want
to give everything we can clasp onto:
a brush of hair from their forehead,
a joke said again, “Dad again again,”
so that even crumbs become exacting.