Father's Sons Poem by jason wymore

“Why is your face wet? ”
I ask my child?

Why is water falling from your chin,
And why are your eyes irises of dancing fish?

He is wet,
Because he just drank from a mermaids mouth:
The spigot of a public fountain,
Where just last week,
I wanted to drown
him.

But today there is love on our faces
The weather is a ripe sun above puffy
White rivers
A lazy hot California is resting at our feet.

My mind was too busy drinking East of Eden
Flowing through dust bowls filled with Cain
To busy
to notice
My son drink:
One or three times.

He looks at me his pale face, a question
Looking at the empty on our table,
“You drank my stuff.”

I nod I did.
I drank his the way,
my father drank
mine, his constant anger
terrified me.

I am I my father,
In my son’s eyes?
Do I make him afraid to drink
Chlorine?

Really,

I am still a son
In my father’s eye’s?

I swam three oceans to lose him.
But never stopped wanting him
My only father who raised me

Whom I needed to learn how to swim.

My son’s shirt, his wet eyes
Show me,
I have always been the man
Who
Raised
Me.

My father who left his own dad
for the Vietnam draft to find
a son’s peace.
But now, I am the father
And only my son is thirsty.

His feet washing
Away turn
My lips into levies
He returns, once again
To satisfy
His belly still full of thirst.

I wonder if he will leave
Me.
The way I left
My dad to join America’s war
But only made it to dark bars
Filling my belly with liquor.

I swam
Up vain riverbeds
To escape
Home. Where attention on family night eluded
Me.

I never thought I would be a father.
If I had, I would have never left.
I’m sorry Dad.



My son drinking
tells me,

Men wish to be good fathers
Because they never stop being sons.