People inherit
the bowl of destiny from their fathers,
and this is what I have been debating with myself,
as my son grows away from me
into his own waters, signs, and braided dough.

Between my father and my son
runs a sympathetically dreadful fiefdom.
It carries a message Plautus,
that remarkable Roman dramatist, mouthed thus:
"What is yours is mine, and all mine is yours."

Fatherhood, of course, is never dire news
but then, those spates of heavy silences
meant to inspire, provoke, teach and guide;
the things a father leaves for a son as Inheritance!
A psychological makeup that only
very late in life blooms and bleeds.

There was a flat 15 foot long log
in the yard of our house.
Every Thursdays my father used to
"skin the pineapple" and serve it chilled
with the seedless flesh of hard jackfruit.

The exquisite tang of this tropical combination      
lasted for hours, but I never lost sight of my
father's hands carving pineapple and jackfruit.
He always cut them thwartwise, as if carving
distances away; and serving continents together.  

When I started to reinterpret
his hand movements
as the skin of my eyes,
it was too late.
He died without saying a word.
Without pouring out a syllable,
yet he was being cut
in a transversal of dawns,
as death plucked him towards
its ascending gravity.

I was alone, fawning in a fiefdom
I barely breathed tropical or recognized
as a sign, a friendly clepsydra or a loaf.
Today as I recall him
I barely picture his face, his large hands,
but I can still smack
the old bowl of the fruity blend
he left carved open.