Formulas, binary and chemical reactions make more sense
Than the science of human interaction to this
Academic, who can write a dissertation but finds difficult
Expression of affection

Never keen on the idea of fatherhood
Pacifiers and baby bottles never felt a natural fit like
The attraction of hydrogen to oxygen

Yet somehow
Carnation-colored socks, knit from hands
Mapped with age spots and lines
Revealed an attic unknown before

A seven-pound baby no longer, she is
A young girl with
Cascading locks the hue of autumn leaves
But his fatherly love has not disappeared in the breeze
With the lullabies and pumpkin costumes
Now folded in a dusty dresser
Whose drawers do not align

Even still
He erred
An honest six-second careless error
One door open
Four wheels rolling
Only three seats filled
He can do the math

He was a chemist and a physicist
But the value of the coefficient of friction does not explain
The damage of two fair-skinned, freckled knees
Scraped across asphalt like fingernails on an emery board
While the derivative does not disclose the force of a silver Acura
On the hand of a ten-year-old dancer in a crimson cotton dress
Nor does his Ph.D. give him the prescience to predict
How pavement carves caverns
Into size 12 girls' sandals
In a white that only stays bright for one day of wear
And fills them with souvenirs of gravel and tar

He looks at the girl whose porcelain skin is now sinewy flesh
He knows computations of the centripetal force
Or the force of friction will not measure
The pain his daughter is feeling, and
As if his stomach isn't a stress ball
Squeezed and contorted
Yells come from his son and wife
For this girl's uncovered flesh, and
This man,
Never a quiet one,
Is silent

How can he quantify his daughter's pain?
Blood escaped from youthful veins
Tears that went sledding down her snowy pale cheeks
Or the exact angle of her tilted head, held down in shame
He knows
Some things can't be calculated