Music Man

Oh father, oh music man with a whistle instead of a coin to toss on your walks, keep these things for us until we're ready to come home: our baby teeth, fragments of bone that rattle in a domino box. Tuck it in your pocket but please don't gamble it away the way you lost our christening gowns in poker. We had outgrown them, true, but what other proof did we have that all seven of our outfits could be stacked and shuffled like a deck of cards. Keep the bottle cap opener hanging by a string. Wear it like a locket and stay collared to our after-school bliss when we found you underneath a tree that scattered glass fruit around your feet. The boys lined them up for death by slingshot, and the girls giggled when the bodies shattered. Take good care of our drawings, our crooked handwriting exercises, the scribbles of our names, and sew a suit with sailboats on the sleeves, a coat with Qs sliding down a wire, and pants that celebrate our prepubescent autographs. And in your shoe— don't tell us which! let us guess!— save the coin you told us came from China. It had a hole in the middle because the merchants slid their change on chopsticks. We pictured them on market Sundays holding up their earnings like a shish kabob. We know you hid the coin because all seven of us wanted it and so you took it with you. Or so I claimed. Can I be blamed, oh father, oh story man, for wanting to possess the single thing that couldn't be shared? You saw me slide it out the window of your wallet while you napped and didn't snap to attention to complain. Of all your sons and daughters it is I who wanted to escape the most, to anywhere. I learned the desperate alchemy of flowering a barren day with song from you, oh master. A minstrel needs his freedom. And so you let me take it.