As you drive them to practice,

your son tells his friend

that their tennis coach is 

not the sharpest pencil in the box.

He says this with the same smirking condescension

(and cadence!) that you said it with, 

just two days before.

Moreover, feeling his point might have been 

too subtle he says it again.

At which point you interrupt

to correct your son in front of his friend. 

By which your son understands

you are not correcting his meanness

but his lack of guile.

And you did this all to seem 

nicer than you really are.

In the silent five minutes left 

before you reach the tennis court,

you realize your legacy will be total. 

Your son inherits not just your sense of humor

or your fluid single-handed backhand

but your vanity, pettiness, and spite.

He doesn’t just see you as you present yourself,

or as you conceive of yourself

but as you are. 

And all those not so comic foibles

will become part of him too. 

His words, your words, echo in your thoughts

for five long minutes and then a lifetime more

as you gaze vacantly through the windshield

at all that is before you in time

looking into the future,

the harshest kind of mirror. 

Check out all the work in the Collection: Occasional Verse