Family Music

Though we had no shower to sing in

my mother hummed in the heat of her bath.

My father might whistle while fixing a hinge

or caulking a pane. But after she turned

into ashes, quiet lifted like smoke

through our house—not the quiet you have

after a truck roars by, but wood creak and

groan, or the terrible drip of a faucet.

he groaned and said, No tunes like old tunes,

maybe to me. Nuns had shushed me when I tried

to blend my voice with the choir at Mass.

My mother had laughed. Don’t be sad, she said,

No one in this house can carry a tune

even in a bushel basket. So why

even try when I drive my son to school?

Just to tease him into saying, Quit it?

But alone, I’ll sometimes sing a few lines

from McCartney’s “Let It Be” when I make

the bed and smooth my parents’ counterpane

against fathoms of air, trying for music

with a feeling like his. Dad’s humming came

from deep inside when he was painting,

say, a window frame, or even a white wall,

leaning close, as if toward someone not there.