The landscape is early June,
all lilac and dandelion, foxglove
and rose. Friends ask about dance
in Shanghai, and my daughter
tells them she will be the only
foreigner in a cast of five hundred.
She places her hand in the small
of my back to make me stand tall,
and she bows like a ballerina
at curtain call to pick a dandelion
gone to seed, a gray sphere
the color of my summer beard.
And with one quick breath
brief as twenty years, she sends
a thousand possibilities into the wind,
the empty stalk in her hand
bleeding milk from the broken end,
the head shaped like a perfect star.