Marvin sang with both hands open.
He gave it all away to the same world
that was already coming for him.
I can't do that. My hands don't open like that.

I learned them at a table.
Sundays, the long one, the dishes going around
and not once passing from a hand into a hand.
We set things down in front of each other
and stepped back and let the other one reach.
Nobody in that house ever gave anybody anything.
That is where the hands get their instructions.
Nothing was ever put in mine,
so they learned to stay shut. They are still shut.
I am telling you this with them closed.

The man who taught me that weighs nothing now
and I have carried him up every staircase of my life.
My father. The song I know every word of
and cannot play in a room with people in it.
For years I lay in the dark and rebuilt him,
gave him a warmer voice, gave him better hands,
hands that knew the difference
between holding a boy and holding a boy under.
Marvin's father never learned that difference either.
So there were two of them, and there were two of us,
and only the sons ever found out which was which.

Marvin's ended loud, in a room, at close range.
Mine ended on a Tuesday, on the telephone,
and nobody would call it an ending.
He said the thing he always said.
I heard myself not answering.
And then I did the only violent thing
I have ever done to him: I stopped calling.
No announcement. No last word.
I let the silence in and I kept it fed.
Years of it now. I am the one who did that.

So call it settled. Call it paid.
What I have instead of a father
is a receiver, the tone going on and on,
and that exact hush before a man hangs up.
After that the line went slack the way it goes slack
between a ship and the one who walked out of it,
and neither of us has known since
whether the other is still turning out there
or has been falling a long time in the dark.

I lived inside that hush for years.
I kept two things in it.
I kept the hate the way a family keeps good silver,
wrapped, in a drawer, brought out for nobody.
And I kept the loneliness running underneath,
a record nobody put the needle on
that turns all night regardless.

Hate in the drawer. Loneliness on the turntable.
That was the house I actually grew up in.
And down the hall my mother was teaching herself
to sleep on one half of a bed
and leave the other half made in the morning,
the way you keep a room for somebody
you have stopped expecting.

And I cursed him. Thoroughly. For years.
With all the rage one house can hold
before the windows start to go.

Then: they opened Marvin's father's head
and found a nameless thing
that had been growing there the whole time.
It forgave him nothing.
But it gave the living somewhere to lay the blame.

God help me, I want that for mine.
I want a nameless thing to bloom in the dark of him.
I want it to account for the Sundays.
For the Decembers when the overtime came home on time
and he did not.
For a whole house teaching itself, room by room,
to stop listening for an engine slowing at the corner,
for the sound a car makes when it turns in
and is finally the right one.

Let it be hungry. Let it go without a map.
Let it be too stupid to tell the good tissue from the bad.
No. Let it be smart.
Let it eat only the part of him that reached me,
and let it leave the man on the floor
running a toy car along the carpet,
the one who sang me to sleep,
who loved his kid and showed it,
whoever he was before something moved in
behind his eyes and started wearing him.

Something nameless. Something that lets us both put it down.

I am not Marvin.

He sang to the thing that was killing him
and it was still killing him and he sang.
He had a father to be furious at.
I have the shape of one.
I have the cold place in the hallway
where a man was supposed to be standing.

Nobody ever showed me the grip.
Not taught. Required.
And I have been doing the impression ever since,
small in the sleeves,
small in the shoulders,
small in the voice that has to answer the telephone.

I put the needle on Mercy Mercy Me
and I cry at the note
no man should be able to hold.