The jukebox of my father’s hands plays on and on,
the guitar balanced childlike on his knee.
Although he does not bring out the support arm
or the little footstool, he sits up straight
against the sagging easy chair so that
his hands are free. I slouch in the chair beside him,
also armed, my frame supported on the
burnished empty wooden box I hold.
When I go south to visit, this is what we do,
sit up in the dusty living room
of his air-conditioned house, playing music,
the house crouched beneath the squat mountain,
which is not a mountain really, but
a finger of the plateau that stretches
through here from Georgia almost to Ohio.
And really it is only he that plays.
Though years ago I gave up thinking
on my separate fretboard I could imitate
the motion of his hands, I’ll try a while
to make sense of the borrowed instrument.
He always keeps at least one spare. He cares
that I care enough to entertain
the possibility. It isn’t that
we do not talk, but somehow talk falls short.
Watchbands and bicycles, external hard-drives aside,
we are not quite satisfied we know each other’s mind.
On and on, the baroque James Taylor
coloratura, the peach and periwinkle
North Carolina sunset he’s been practicing
since the seventies, before he went
off to the war, the original Travis-pick
now overgrown with ornament, the pattern
now submerged, but still expected.
Even as a young man, he was afraid
to show his voice before an audience.
Now, nearing seventy, he plays still close-mouthed.
The simple farmhouse he inhabits,
his still-nimble fingers hammering-on
and on, as if installing new appliances.
I’ve learned enough to hear how few the chords are.
His hands now spidering across only
the first three frets, constrained to some old
country song, something to wail against
a broken banjo, something I would know.
He is trying. He leans forward. I see now
He has been waiting for me to sing.