The house is fully furnished:
A mother, three kids and the TV;
The father is upstairs, attached to a guitar:
An intricate arrangement of strings and chords;
An intimate arrangement of bodies and words.
My hobby, he once declaimed,
Is not playing the guitar,
It’s learning to play the guitar.
Then he took himself off for a session.
A terse man, pithy under the skin.
Once, maybe twice,
He’d handed me the guitar
Like a baton, like a lesson.
I never learned. He never listened.
And so, only when the music stopped,
Was the poem written.
Now, sometimes, if I listen very hard
I can still hear the fingers at work:
The tiny metallic flowers blooming,
Filling the air; dandelion heads
Going to seed, wind-blown.
The time is always the same: too late.
