The Secret Inside My Father’s Guitar
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 berry-colored cocktails and dinner tables, and to all
the strangers they will escort into and out 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 stuck
it walks right past without noticing tiny old me singing
to it every Thursday from 5-8PM. How so many of us
roll these little sounds we are together into a ball and call them
a life, and maybe it’s just breath or the God that making
sound is for me, or whatever religion music communions upon
my spine when I am making it, but I try to be standing
inside its making at every moment, and perhaps, the poem, too, is this
place I nail together the parts of myself which had been
separate, 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 stanzas of the old
cowboy ballad that most fathers must die before their sons
come to understand this: all the sentences always coalesce
into something as unfathomable as the meaning we might juice
out of minutes with our parents we will 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
gently. It is, of course, of the moments when grown men hold
each other that I sing tonight. 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 oaks,
my friend told me a secret about his father’s death, and though this
poem is a secret we keep between pages like a pressed butterfly,
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 eloquent 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 impossible
details, impossibly true, 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 anemone pool of my shellfish brain
while I’m setting up my amplifier and microphone and guitar
before a three-hour show I’m about to play for strangers eating
squid ink capellini at a restaurant in Charlotte. And while I am
tuning for sound check but haven’t yet played a note, while these
human tides churn sloppy inside me, a bald man who has
signed his bill and is headed somewhere out into the city
approaches me so slowly, and without a word the bald 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 hidden,
and then he says to me, This is a beautiful guitar, to which I reply,
Thank you, he’s an old Carvin, but I still love it, and this
open instrument (becoming a shared ocean 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’s
hands played so much music, and I smile another, I know,
and everyone here, even you, is holding their thin-glassed
cocktails in their fingers and could take another expensive sip
or could decide to change their lives forever, but I am saying
maybe it is the men standing and, over and over again, saying
nothing to each other that is the most expensive, over and over,
which is why I am trying to suspend myself in every measure
as holy as this one by talking my way back through it,
and by asking you, now, what is the weight of the private
misery we all share on this night in Charlotte, or any night,
and when I cannot bathe anymore in the curved uncertainty
of my questions, I must sail back into the poem of experience,
so I 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. This moment is too big for a poem
to hold. The images have outswum their meaning and arrived
at the spot on the orange carpet where language, too, evaporates.
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.
A singer-songwriter, poet, and essayist, Ephraim Scott Sommers is the author of two books: Someone You Love Is Still Alive (2019) and The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire (2017). His third book, Diabetic Gumdrops, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag in 2026. Currently, he lives in Rock Hill, South Carolina and is an Associate Professor of English at Winthrop University. For more words and music, please visit: www.ephraimscottsommers.com.