Don McLean

Somehow, music.
I was a boy but still at home,
no real muscle yet
or coarseness,
but something inside
pumping

and the den,
which was a living room,
on the Hi Fi,
before we had money
(your money)

playing music.
Your songs,
as a gift

I see now,
how the songs that haunted your own
youth stayed so nutted
and encased
in the you
of you,

I see how when you laid the vinyl
on that amazing turning table
which moved like the world,
and the arm of god came round
with its diamond tip

and scratched mankind
into singing, into being.

You played your songs
on that special thing,
and what you could not feel aloud
you watched for signs of
in your son,
and it was like a gift.

One, you might have later
tried to take away,
or perhaps knew
too well
would be taken anyway

by that same spinning world,
and taloned arm of god,
your father,
his father, the cold machine.

Now I think I know,
what you tried to say to me,

the couch, the carpet,
the old wooden speakers,
a quiet sort of spot
to swallow that brief vial of life,
before
it would all be tested
so relentlessly.