I’ve got a good pucker and fill an empty hallway 
at work with a whistle where I cross paths 
with psychiatric patients. My whistle trills 
between melody and torture, one says.
I come from a line of whistlers on my mother’s side
but whistling ends with me. No one whistles anymore.

I am fond of Shenandoah and English folk songs
and I suppose the melodies being two centuries old
is part of the denigration of song I offer others.
No one know the tunes. None of my children whistle. 
One tries, but it’s mostly a little squeak and lot of air,
like an inner tube with a moderate leak.

My Great-grandpa Fuller used to whistle. 
He whittled, too, but could not whittle 
and whistle at the same time, he’d say, 
as one took concentration and one the lack. 
He smoked a pipe when he whittled, 
which is more the reason a whistle 
could not slip out. He taught my mom to whistle, 
taking his thumb against one cheek
and his fingers to the other and squeezing 
until her lips formed the perfect aperture 
for breath to become a song in flight. 
She took up trombone, preferring blare to tweet. 
The whistling diminished until she took her thumb 
to one cheek of my face and her fingers to the other 
and turned my breath to wing.
Even now, as I sit, a melody waits 
to launch from the embouchure of my lips.
                        

Every day still polarized, 
people like the shavings 
of iron between magnets.
I tear remembrance in half
like an old newspaper before a fire
unable to piece together the story
into one before the flame consumes it.
Each generation suffers 
with our long division.