Joseph's Riddle

I.

Son lives and father begins to die,
as surely as the morrow
preempts the day
it was founded on.

The flow is in two directions.
the backward
is the weaker flow,
a current kicked by the breeze
on a windward stream.

Time is carried despite emotion.
And life flows, too,
out of father into the son
until it becomes
dialectic,
a balanced motion.

The river draws off the land to feed the sun,
and I see my son
bring life like the springtime rains.
My own father steps more briskly.
He has a lightness I cannot recall.

II.

A particularly nagging notion:
that my son gives back
in his son
what, a son, he took
in the same pure form
as a distillate
from the liquid he thought he knew
and is drunk,
is drunk
as the liquor of forbidden fruit.