Fathers and Sons

When the day comes my son looks through me

I will be ready as my father was not,

a father who took refuge that day in totem silence.

But now my son is too tiny even for the blind worship

I saw spark the eyes of a four year old

across the aisle last Sunday morning on the bus.

And the father, twenty maybe, skin blotched from the flask

he drew from his jeans each time we braked for a town,

swatted, as if he could bat away some ache,

every time the little one laid a hand across his chest.

Neither had stopped trading love when I got off.

I dream my son will arrive at epiphany, manly, violent.

It will strip him like a young brave

walking naked into the brush, his body

swinging its full height. It will last one night

and finish at dawn when he refuses to come home but must-

his own camp set up, the ground burned and staked,

the crossed sticks erected, the skins stretched to fit

that ancestral concept, a tepee of his own.

He'll be dressed unlike me in some hide he has tanned

and about ready to parlay, whooping in place,

he'll call the powwow, meet me on the line,

attempt half the talking, midway between our camps,

dancing mad I'm his size, red-faced he wants me gone.

And then, on the verge of tears, he'll take one step back,

a signal my father's ghost stands between us on this earth.

This will be the moment I tell him he can wait-

he has time, no one is standing in judgment, no one will-

to take back the blow he would like to strike

if I spoke. I won't speak. I'll be my father standing firm,

refusing a son the blood of his one father.