My father at the dictionary stand Touches the page to fully understand The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand

His slowly scanning magnifying lens, A blurry, glistening circle he suspends Above the word ‘Carnation’. Then he bends

So near his eyes are magnified and blurred, One finger on the miniature word, As if he touched a single key and heard

A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string, “The obligation due to every thing That’ s smaller than the universe.” I bring

My sewing needle close enough that I Can watch my father through the needle’s eye, As through a lens ground for a butterfly

Who peers down flower-hallways toward a room Shadowed and fathomed as this study’s gloom Where, as a scholar bends above a tomb

To read what’s buried there, he bends to pore Over the Latin blossom. I am four, I spill my pins and needles on the floor

Trying to stitch “Beloved” X by X. My dangerous, bright needle’s point connects Myself illiterate to this perfect text

I cannot read. My father puzzles why It is my habit to identify Carnations as “Christ’s flowers,” knowing I

Can give no explanation but “Because.” Word-roots blossom in speechless messages The way the thread behind my sampler does

Where following each X, I awkward move My needle through the word whose root is love. He reads, “A pink variety of Clove,

Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh.” As if the bud’s essential oils brush Christ’s fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh

Odor carnations have floats up to me, A drifted, secret, bitter ecstasy, The stems squeak in my scissors, Child, it’s me,

He turns the page to “Clove” and reads aloud: “The clove, a spice, dried from a flower-bud.” Then twice, as if he hasn’t understood,

He reads, “From French, for clou, meaning a nail.” He gazes, motionless,”Meaning a nail.” The incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail,

I twist my threads like stems into a knot And smooth “Beloved”, but my needle caught Within the threads, Thy blood so dearly bought,

The needle strikes my finger to the bone. I lift my hand, it is myself I’ve sewn, The flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own,

I lift my hand in startled agony And call upon his name, “Daddy Daddy” — My father’s hand touches the injury

As lightly as he touched the page before, Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore The flowers I called Christ’s when I was four.