Mi Hijo, My Son

Today I return to the morning
when I was walking downstairs, carrying you
in my arms. I saw myself falling, twisting 
to land on my back, cushion you on my chest. 
You lost your mother at fourteen months. 
That was a fall I could not break.

When you were five, your sister was born,
and we said, You’re a big brother now,
not a baby anymore. I took you 
to the store and you chose Goldilocks, 
the tale of a baby sister who ate 
her brother’s porridge.

A year ago, your first adventure alone, 
you phoned from grandfather’s birthplace in Veracruz. 
At first I heard only your tears, then pain, infection, 
eyes swollen shut, a Red Cross Doctor. I want to go back
to that day I decided not to rescue you.
You forgave me, but I cannot forgive myself.

Today you turn twenty. I want to hold you, say I love you 
even when you curse my bourgeois ways, 
the way I avoid the eyes of a man who begs for food. 
You’re in Peru, perhaps the Andes, 
or the Upper Amazon. Please tell me—nothing 
that wakes me in the night has happened to you.