For Father's Day: Mom remembers her father

Paul H. Daus, a mathematician, bred iris in Los Angeles, sometimes enjoying blooms every day of the year.

Existence and Uniqueness

Dreamwise he stood in my early wakefulness
Holding out toward me what I could take.
Can anyone say anything unique about
Being father and daughter, that the leaves
Drifting downstream on the waters
Have not swirled by before?
He and I, closing mindwise only so seldom,
But more, to be sure, than with the others
Who have shared our time-space
Quarters as human beings.
For laughwise he was good for me.
Loud, gentle, with tall stories.
A rollicking parody on furry-footed hobbits
Written to me when I was ill and away from home...
Writing now, therefore is in his image.
And flowers -
Branching trident-like
Are his iris.
I recall mulched beds of pincushion flowers,
of snapdragons and chrysanthemums
That serve me now with happiness.
An iris has three standards and three falls.
Three upon three for three square
And 3 to the third power and thus
To infinity of natural numbers and
Infinity of real numbers.
Q.E.D., uniqueness and existence
Of my father and I are proved.
Who can doubt it in the 
Persistence of dreams?




August 6, 1973