GRIEF II RESEMBLANCES james yates

They tell me, “He looks just like you; You can’t deny the resemblance. He’s his father’s Son, alright.”

My eyes

My chin My face. I tell them, “He’ll grow out of it.”

Now, bathed in the pale moonlight sitting here, naked, holding him for his 3 a.m. bottle He looks up, reaches out, touches my cheek. My throat tightens.

I fear the resemblance. Not the physical one; the one deeper where the rivers of the heart run dark and silent.

I hope for a good reflection: That’s what I see when he smiles, when his face beams with light, kicking away the darkness.

His birth, my birth his childhood, my childhood. Two paths split in the dark. He almost died at the beginning. I died a little later.

At his age, I knew fire: hot, blazing, destroying. So they tell me. I brushed Death twice more within six months. She stepped up onto the highway and met a truck head-on. Then, so they tell me, Mother went out for groceries and didn’t come back for eight years. They tell me it was Abandonment. But it felt like Death, only softer.

I don’t want him to know this feeling: left alone for hours, cold, wet, hungry, dirty, crying in the dark with nobody home. I don’t ever want him to feel a father’s fist punching his lips and the taste of copper.

Caroline House

I want him to feel safe and warm, accepted and loved. That’s where our resemblance ends.

When he’s older I’ll tell him what it was like to watch from a doorway across the street, accidently, as she climbs aboard a bus secretly.

He’ll never sit screaming between natural father and the legal one, whiskey hanging in the air, between shaking fists and angry voices.

I hope he’ll never remember: six years old, sitting for hours alone and cold in the car outside a bar, waiting, or the long meandering road back up the holler to the still and the moonshiner’s weak-old sweat, tobacco juice stream, and greasy overalls.

I hope he never spends Christmas dinner alone in public because the old man put away a gallon of peach brandy before his very eyes.

I know his birth papers will be easy and clear and his family branches untangled legally.

He will look like me on the outside and he may carry my good parts; but there the resemblance will end. His light will come from my shadow.

And here, we are joined in the pale moonlight.

I know he will be rooted and solid and true.