Losing a Voice in Summer
.
How many parts rumble it was
how much gravel
dark, light
I don’t remember
and it won’t echo for me
from the shower stall
though sometimes off the porch
calling my own sons for supper
I can almost
almost hear it
as if you had let it go
out of the corner
of your mouth
like a ventriloquist
without a dummy.
I have no recording
otherwise I would play you
in the shower, repeat you
off the porch
from the cat-walk
of the glass factory have you sing
Go Down Moses
over and over and
tonight
with the reluctant sentence
deep in my head at the hoarsest hour,
dumb and laryngitic and alone
I first understood
how completely I have lost your voice,
father, along with my own.
.
by John Stone
from In All This Rain
Louisiana State University Press, 1980
.