I am having a tough time resisting reading some darkness into it, too. But surely it's not wholly dark. The ambiguity and conflict is what makes it good. It's not "you're an alcoholic dick head, pops."
I feel like this is one of those poems whose whole is contained in the seed of each line. Lines like "You beat time on my head" say everything the poem as a whole says: the violence, love, manual labor, addiction, reconciliation, memory, music: it's all in that one line.
If you follow the meter established by every line that comes before it, the beat falls on "beat" and not "time": you beat time on my head. But if you just say the phrase "beat time" aloud, the emphasis (for me, anyway) seems to naturally fall on "time" and not "beat": he beat time on my head. So you beat time on my head, but also beat time on my head and beat time on my head. Those are all different things, each of which lends its meaning while deferring to the next.
The line doesn't quite know where to put its own beat; it means simultaneous and sometimes conflicting things and can't quite keep a clear three-beat rhythm. What could be more appropriate in a poem about a drunk waltz?
It's a really good line.
I don't remember ever reading this before, but it seems familiar. I don't know if that's because I actually read it at some point or if I haven't and the feeling of familiarity is evidence of just how effective the poem is at working like memory.
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