"Look," said my son, "think of it as a line looped back and forth to bridge an open space unbridgeable at last, but narrowed fine and finer with each passing of the lace almost to zero, which can never be." "Why not?" said I. "That would be certainty, absence of error. It would be too much to hope for." "Then you orbit round your aim, seeking, like Moses, what you'll never touch; or like a poet, hunting for the word to reproduce a song he thinks he heard and send it hunting in the hearer's mind." "Right," laughed my son, "we play the self-same game. Sometimes I think the hunt is all we find, whether we search for song, or sign, or zero." In the still house we talked into the night before I left him, stalking, unafraid, some stubborn truth flicking its dragon tails across the page before him.... my young hero so thinly armored in the flesh I made, my small moon gone so far and grown so bright above my gaze, lighting his awesome skies where I can wield no sort of telescope. Pondering now what love could be, that fails, as fail it must, to seize the flying prize and yet endures, cradling the heart like hope, I tell my son, "Think of it as a line weaving between your orbiting and mine."© Rhina P. Espaillat
From Lapsing to Grace (Bennett and Kichel, 1992)