Most tiny evenings,
in these bars, my lungs
become two boats
swelling with wind,
two boats floating
the ocean of the voice up
into the throat and into
the many melodies I sing
to all the elevated and fun-
colored cocktails
and dinner tables,
and to all the strangers
they will escort into and out of
of these tiny evenings.
Maybe there can be
new uniforms for all
of the old wounds.
I am standing behind
my father’s guitar
on stage again,
and there is a watercolor
frame full of green grapes
on the hallway wall
so ordinary and red
it walks right past
without noticing
tiny old me singing
to it every Thursday
from 5-8PM.
How so many of us
roll these tiny
sounds together
into a ball
and call them a life,
and maybe it’s just breath
or the God that making
art is for me, or whatever religion
music does to my spine
when I am making it,
but I try to be standing
inside an art piece
at every moment,
and perhaps,
the poem, too, is this place
I nail together the parts
of myself which had once been
separate and unartistic,
so I am, anyway, thinking
my way back to California,
when my father and I were
in the middle of a kind
of side-shoulder squeeze,
of a kind of what could’ve been
our last goodbye
for he is coughing
through the last paragraphs
of the old memoir
that most fathers must
die before their sons
come to understand this:
all the sentences
coalesce into something
as unfathomable
as the meaning
we might make
out of moments
with our family
we might come
to misremember.
There we were,
hugging, my father
and I, and I love
the shape of so much
memory gripped
together in this
fragile goodbye
with my father, and I love
when grown men
unlearn the murder
blades of history
and find the gorgeousness
to touch each other.
It is, of course, of the moments
when grown men hold
each other that I sing.
I sing of memory…
In South Carolina,
once, in two lawn chairs,
a little tipsy on a little
Busch Lite and a little
bourbon and a little pinch
of weed, and a lot deep
in that little kind of southern
evening, with all those
wooden ghosts in the oak trees,
my friend told me a secret
about his father’s death,
and though this poem
is a secret we keep between
pages, his is a secret I won’t
reveal to you now,
but it is of he and I
holding each other after
his own revealing
that I am speaking.
I love the hug just as much
as I love the man,
and the secret, then,
I remember,
became a deed
to the building
of friendship, a deed
we still keep in a safety
deposit box with two keys,
as if in a bank vault,
as if we, then, like so many
Carolina businesses
repurposed the bank
into a coffee shop
and the vault became
the walk-in
where the glaze was stowed
(but only when he felt
comfortable taking it
out and talking sweetly
through it), and only in those
pumpkin pie moments before
we’d step into an exquisite
hug, again. Goddamn
I just love hugging men
so much I can feel
those boats inside me
shoving off
from the safe capes
of my ribcage again.
That secret between us,
that secret, him losing
his father so young, its
cruel details, and I’m thinking
of all my other friends
who also lost their fathers
young, or lost them more
recently, or who never met
their fathers, and how much
more hugging men
I could’ve done,
could always do,
and of all these fathers
and sons I am gathering
together for the big manly
hug, the tribal hug,
the hug no one ever taught us,
the hug which many others
might call hyper-masculine
and make us feel ashamed,
but the poem would not,
and it is always for the poem
I sing. I’m thinking about
my own father, too, of course.
And this is all sloshing
around in the messy ocean
which is my brain
while I’m setting up
my amplifier and sound system
and microphone and guitar
before a three-hour show
I’m about to play
for strangers eating capellini
at a restaurant in Charlotte.
And while these human
thoughts are churning,
while I’m tuning my guitar
but have not yet played a note
for sound check, an old man
who’s signed his bill
and is headed somewhere
out into the city approaches me
so slowly, and without a word
the old man hugs my guitar
between us, petting the wood
as tenderly as if it were
a brown cat in our laps,
but we are strangers
and I admit I feel discomfort
and dark sails approaching
the ragged coves of my body
where the feelings are held,
and then he says to me,
This is a beautiful guitar,
and continues fingertipping
the wood, and to which I reply
Thank you, it’s an old
Carvin, and I love it,
and this open instrument
(becoming a shared space
or Lake Wylie or family
member between us),
somehow disarms me,
and he keeps on rubbing
and studying the rough finish
as if blown back into
the kind of memory
that might define
one whole life,
and then he says, My son
had one just like this,
and I don’t know why
I say, I know, but I do.
My son, he says,
could really play,
he had so many guitars,
he says,
so many beautiful guitars,
he says, my son played
so much music,
and I smile another, I know,
and everyone here, even you,
is holding their high-glassed
cocktails in their hands
and could take
another expensive sip
or could decide to change
their lives forever,
but I am saying maybe
it is the standing
and, over and over again,
saying nothing like this
to each other
that is the most expensive
which is why I am
trying to suspend myself
in every moment as holy
as this one by talking
my way back through it,
and by asking you, now,
what is the weight
of what grief we all share
on this night in Charlotte,
or any night, and when we cannot
bathe anymore in the curved
uncertainty of our questions,
we must sail back
into the poem of experience,
so we do. Me and the man
and the whole restaurant
drift back to the present tense,
and then he looks up at me
and no longer at the guitar
that he is still holding
with both hands,
and then he says,
of his son,
And then he died,
and he says it
so flat and simple
I’m unable to respond,
and then the man lets go
and steps away, and turns,
and leaves, and the sentences
unravel themselves,
like businessmen falling
out of high-building windows.
There are no truths
in poems. The images
have outrun their meaning
and arrived at the spot
on the orange carpet
where language, too,
ends. I am always left
standing here, at this
place, alone,
holding something
hollow, something wooden.
I’ve been listening
to the kind of silence
that follows this man
out of the restaurant
my whole life, this silence
we are, all of us, always
living inside,
a silent eternity
of men turning away
from each other,
so I switch on
the sound, I take
a mouthful of wine,
I strum the introduction,
I open my lungs,
and I begin to sing
the only song
I’ve ever known,
the song
of what’s always gone
unsaid for far too long
between all fathers
and sons,
and when the set is done,
I will step out
from behind
this poem
and this guitar,
and I will call my father
and every brother I know.
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