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“I miss the song of cicadas.”

“Song? That screech like a crow just ate a powerline? You’re just being dramatic.”

That’s how I remember my first marriage. When we first met she would bake brownies and we’d eat them in bed and I would read her poetry. There was so little poetry in that place that to read it to a naked woman with brownie crumbs on her chest was as startling as a red balloon in a black and white film.

She was right, of course, cicadas don’t sing. There is nothing poetic about a cicada, even if you call it a June bug, even if your apple cheeked daughter holds out her pudgy dirty little hands and says “See what I caught daddy? June bug.” They are like locusts or crickets on steroids.

It’s how my first marriage ended, not over cicadas but over poetry. I still cling to the idea the June bug sings, that you chuck your daughter under the chin and praise her for her find and celebrate with ice cream by the river as the sun gently dies in the west.

I believe in faith. I believe in passing faith onto your children. I have faith that the June bugs will come, that the river will flow that at the end of every day the sun will gently die in the west. Yes, I know, this is not faith you think, faith is somehow more ephemeral, faith lives in the realm of unknown things, hidden things.

Try telling that to a June bug or a river or your daughter who believes everything you say because you are her father, because you praise her for the most ordinary things, you praise her for paying attention. I believe faith is a practical thing. It is a way of keeping wonder among the prosaic, among the hordes dying to tell you June bugs don’t sing, the river’s current is a gravitational pull from the headwaters borne to the sea, the sun doesn’t gently die anywhere, the earth turns on its axis and the sun stays centered. Even to say the earth turns her face from the sun; someone will tell your daughter, no, the earth is a rock, it has no face.

I have faith in marriage too. I don’t have enough practical faith to keep the currents running, the earth turning, the June bugs singing or a wife from turning to a pillar of salt or something more bitter like lemon rind. Even practical faith is a leap.