GALE ACUFF

Song

In the barnloft I wield an old broom like
a guitar and finger the handle and strum
the straws and sing "I Saw Her Standing There"
by the Beatles. It's 1964
and we live in Marietta, Georgia,
on a small dead farm our parents bought for
$7000, with out-buildings,
fences, a pig-pen, and small shelter
that we call a playhouse, perhaps a home
for tenants. Our cousins are visiting
from Alabama. Seven of them and
six of us. I think I'm John Lennon, stand
the way he does on Ed Sullivan when
he's singing lead. But I don't have long hair
or a collarless jacket or those shoes,
those Beatle boots my brother wants to buy.
I'm looking into the galleries of
screaming teenaged girls. They're out there
somewhere, near the ceiling, with its oak beams
and corrugated tin roof. My cousin
Rick, thirteen years old, stands off to one side
and laughs as I do the first lines. Lennon
leans into the microphone, sings and smiles
at the same time, and slightly bounces up
and down. It's Paul does the song, Rick says. Not
John. John comes in on the chorus. George, too,
maybe. But you're still pretty good, he laughs.
He and my brother own Sears Silvertone
guitars, practice Bob Dylan tunes after
I go to bed each night. They sing worse than
Dylan, if that's possible. I've tried to
learn to play myself but I can't get it;
I want to sing well but I fail. Even
then I know that I'm not going to be

anything. I lie in bed and look up
through the black toward the ceiling and it's like
looking into space. I even see stars,
those zillions of dots that show night
is never truly dark. I can't make out
the ceiling--this must be infinity.
God must be this big. This is why you can't
get music out of a bottle or write
it down, except for letters and numbers,
that  you can't hear unless you're Beethoven
or Mozart or maybe Nelson Riddle
or the Fab Four. I'm alone on this planet
of bed in the universe of my room.
Only music leaks in, as if from Heaven,
and my brother and cousin are angels
and their guitars are harps and I can't fall
asleep until the gods of my parents
tell them to knock it off, it's time for bed,
you can play some more tomorrow, not one
more peep, don't you know some nice songs, "Onward,
Christian Soldiers" or "Cherry Berry Bin"
or what's that number from South Pacific,
it goes la de da, no, it goes da dum
da dum, oh, faddle, it's nearly ten, for pity's
sake, you boys listen to your mommas now,
don't force us to send your fathers in there,
if we have to send them in to get you
to mind there'll be the devil to pay.
Aw, Ma, wails my brother, it's Friday night.
I don't care if it's Judgement Day, she says,
get to bed. So the music stops. I close

my eyes but I still see those spicks and specks
but because imagination's dreaming
while your eyes are closed, I see myself on
stage, in Beatles' threads with Beatle hair,
singing and playing on Ed Sullivan,
and I go from song to song and my feet
twitch to the drums and bass but it's hopeless,
I can't sleep and I never want to die
and I don't know the meaning of life and
I never will and the last time I asked
my father what it's all about, he said
Better men than you have asked that question,
as if to answer it, and I'm sorry
I bothered him but maybe he just meant

"She loves you, and you know you should be glad,"
whoever she is, or will be. I know
already that that won't satisfy me.
Nothing will. I'll grow up to learn to think
too much, go nowhere, never make money,
probably teach for a living, never
drive a new car, and never change the world.
I don't understand that those who change it
never do, either. The birth of the blues.

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