SEEING MY FATHER

One evening last week in the short period of magic light between day and night, I stood on the narrow platform between swaying railway cars on the Mexican line between Chihuahua and Los Mochis when I glanced back from watching towering rock cliffs and deep, subtropical ravines of Copper Canyon to the door into car number four. The surface of the class in the door had turned to hazy mirror in the deepening darkness.

This was not the first time it has happened. Usually it’s when I’m walking down a street in the city or passing quickly by a mirror in our house. For several years now I have been occasionally surprised suddenly by the image of my father reflected back at me. When I was young, people would tell me I looked like him, but I didn’t see it. He was thirty-two when I was born; so when I was fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, I couldn’t believe that I looked like a man who was almost fifty. Ha! Now I am seventy-two, and I am nothing but pleased when someone who has known both of us says I look like him. Thinking about how much I look like my father always reminds me of Wordsworth’s poem:

MY HEART LEAPS UP WHEN I BEHOLD

By William Wordsworth


My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;

So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

In the early evening on the railway car platform I stood stock still staring. When he seemed to stare back at me from the railway car window, I felt an impulse to speak. The face, my face, reflected in the window could have been his. But I said nothing. What was there to say? He has been dead for almost forty years.

A few days later I created a conversation I might have had with him:

THESE DAYS MORE THAN EVER

These days more than ever
I get him mixed up with me.
I wonder who the reflection is
as I walk along the street,
glancing sideways to catch him
staring back at me.
It’s the way he looked,
the way he walked,
and this morning
as I spread the lather
around my face
avoiding the mustache
it was my face...and his,
his mustache and mine.

He says,
we should have talked.

I say,
about what?

About everything, he says.

We are talking now, I say.

I know, but it’s too late.

I don’t like the idea that it’s too late
for anything...
especially talking.
What is it I should know from you?

Isn’t there anything,
some unanswered question
after all these years?

I once wanted to ask you about Mother.
Did you ever...
you know, step out on her.

Every day when I went out into the world.

Every day? I don’t believe it.

Every day. I stepped out on her.
The world and I had an affair
and she was jealous.
One day I went off with death
and didn’t come back.