In my life your life has not been sterile and the quiet art of my composure fails at your cleaned hands that seem not the father's hands that raised me from this earth at five o'clock homecomings, leaving their talisman prints; not my father's hands, that after soap and water, fed us all still rimmed with dark lines of life lived apart from me. My composure fails: I know you will be my father for only a time, but I will always be your child.