Mistaking Myself for my Father

My father was not, as fathers go,
a teacher of things.
He didn’t show me how to fish
or change the oil
or tie any of the knots
a boy is supposed to learn
from someone.
What he gave me, mostly,
were sentences,
delivered the way other men
hand you a tool:
here, this might be useful,
or it might not.

You can smell water
from a mile off, he said once,
if you know what wet wool
and damp moss
smell like together.
I have repeated this
to myself for years
as if it were wisdom.
It might be wisdom.
It might be a thing
he said one afternoon
because the air
happened to smell like that,
and I happened to be standing there,
and I have spent the rest of my life
turning a passing remark
into a doctrine.

He didn’t teach me how to listen,
not really.
What he did was sit quietly
in a room I happened to be in,
and I, wanting something
to take from him,
took the silence
and called it a lesson,
and named him the teacher
of a course
he never knew he was offering.

Maybe that is what sons do
with fathers like ours.
We assemble them
out of the few things they said
and the many things they didn’t,
and we hand the finished man
back to ourselves
as a gift
we pretend he gave us.

Still.
When I am lost,
which I still get,
even now,
I stop walking
in the middle of wherever I am,
and I listen,
and I tell myself
he taught me this…,
the silence I am listening to
might just be my own,
finally grown
old enough
to be mistaken for his.