Men make marks in many ways; they leave their fingerprints over architecture and literature and in the bell towers and stained glass of churches. They create history and religion and nations and politics and libraries, all to prove and permit existence and behavior. There are wars and peace treaties, there are horrors and heroes; there are dragons and Siegfrieds. But there are also Rapunzels, not locked in towers but hiding there, hair in plaits thick and sturdy, waiting for the sun to arc and fall. Waiting for bedtime, unbraiding, Daddy climbing the stairs, unafraid of spinning wheels, fresh flax or pricked fingers. They carry bedtime stories and a goose they call Mother for company. I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms: This strange being, daughter. Sentient and so tall, so quickly. Sprung forth whole, it seems: I thought you were a headache but instead a goddess, what a pleasant surprise you are, borne of my temples and fairy tales. You inspire my attempt at writing you, to catch you and pin you to the page, as if you were a specimen and I the doddering lepidopterist. You cannot be classified; I cannot track your celestial navigations. You are a story, Daddy. You unfold and refold, you are an origami crane with words tucked between the geometric planes of its architecture. You are history and myth, origin and cosmos, the dragon and the knight. We are pirates, Daddy, we are Vikings, there are oceans to be circumnavigated and villages to plunder together, tonight. Sit at the foot of my bed, tell me a story. I will be Ariadne, clever enough to plot the route leading out of the labyrinth, or into it, because that's where the story is. From the world's first origins: a squalling thing, this daughter. Your stories and mythologies, at first a nonsense on my ears, too shallow yet to catch and hold. We are building histories, ones that will not be housed in the annals of mankind, but rather in the den of my childhood home: albums, baby books, the collected scribblings of a toddler. Tell me a story, Daddy, I can't sleep tonight. To my own time, inspire my attempts: Without the nursery rhymes and Napoleonic campaigns, the Greek mythologies and Victorian poetries, this whole thing, daughter, would not exist. She would be welter and waste and darkness over the deep: instead, form, and matter and light. You gave me five hundred pounds and a room of my own, a light that broke upon the heavens. A body, changed into a new form: I will tell you a story now, Daddy; you have given me a voice with which to speak.
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