Robert Fillman

One Day My Father’s Father

showed up for an unexpected visit.
I was seven or eight, and terrified
of meeting new people. He was a drunk

with a short temper, a frustrated man
in a sagging white v-neck that hung from
his chest like a well-worn belt on a nail.

His eyes were sharp, fine-bladed pocketknives.
A carpenter by trade his body was
pared down to a whittled scrap of wood, not

some broad-shouldered force. And yet I cowered.
He sat at my mother’s kitchen table,
told me to speak when spoken to, answer

if addressed by my elders, laughed because
I looked like my father. I didn’t know
then he had beaten my dad as a kid,

later kicked him out of the house, disowned
him as a young man. That morning he swore
just a few hours with him and I'd be whipped

into shape. He rasped this under his breath
barely two inches from my face. That is
what I recall, that and how he splintered
apart when Dad’s truck rumbled up the drive.