legacy

in my father's life, four vows and the
accompanying rings have been lost--
& though I traded his
marriages for engagements,
I'm seeing too much of him
in me, looking for fault
that can't be mine.

friends and strangers
study my son's face, seeking
a resemblance: oh, he's got
your eyes--or--you can tell
he's his daddy's boy.

we see what we wish to see
in a child's face,
we write our own scripts
into their hearts,
interpret their cries
as sure signs of the traits we desire
or fear.

it's rare for a man to change
his last name, but my dad
grew up hearing his own father referred to as
'that no-good son-of-a-bitch'
until the stepson became the adopted son,
and the last traces of clinton o'dell
were filed away in the labette county courthouse.

my sister did the same,
changing a signature, notarizing a form,
thinking to undo the ugliness
of custody fights--blame enough
can‘t explain--she's still a little girl
missing her dad.

After seventy-two years, my father
held a photograph of his father for the first time.

learned he stood at 6'4,
remarried, had no other children,
indulged a devastating attraction to
the bottle, suffered an early stroke,
& died a bit of a black sheep.

on sunday, dad will
visit the grave,
hear stories from cousins
he's just met, and try,
if it's not too late, to understand
this shame in our past.

making sense of shared pessimism--
why we treat those we can't do without
like they're already gone.

so here is a poem for my grandfather,
for broken traditions,
for my father holding on to me,
a legacy rewritten for this boy of mine,
something more like devotion and less like
the million moments sacrificed to the sin of walking away.