Sidney
My mother says I was made from you.
You ate only carbohydrates,
root vegetables and processed meat.
I inherited your very limited palate.
I inherited your personally annotated
copies of Karl Popper and Frost.
(Your marginal notes
are a higher order of thought.
I cherish the intimations of your penmanship
more than this literary inheritance.)
Why didn’t you eat more vegetables?
When I am old I will inherit
your colon cancer, your pancreatic
cancer, or whatever
you had. I have your digestive
issues, but I am not a drinker —
I don’t intend to pass as many stones.
I once had a vocation
for law school, but where did that go?
In college you were on a football team
and so am I, in spite of definitions.
You owned a hat business.
That has nothing to do with
anything but I think that is
cool. On airplanes I have looked for you
among clouds. In my seventh year
I asked the pilot
to fly through the thickest cumulus
that I might find you there.
