Sweet Spot

Once, in the winter of nineteen sixty four
I met John Fahey at Mother Neptune’s,
The coffee house by Los Angeles City College.
I was eighteen, growing out my hair,
With a joint in my pack of Chesterfields,
As I counted on my burning fingers
All the trespasses that would raise the lamp
That would cauterize the needle,
To dip in ink from a broken ballpoint pen.
Blue stigmata carnations that someday
Would bloom as music inside my head,
Or later, now, as words on this page.

John came in wearing a blue work shirt,
Jeans, and a sport coat, which I thought
Was very cool in those days.
He was holding his hand on his head
“So it wouldn’t fall off,” someone joked.
It was only later that I came to recognize
The resolve of the posture,
Having been certain at times, that if my voice
Receded any farther into the corner of the room
It would turn itself inside out
And I would start talking in tongues and disappear
Like smoke from a signal fire,
Out the top of my head.

He was dangling a soda bottle by the neck
Jack Daniels mixed with Coca Cola.
He borrowed my Gibson with the faded, redish top
And played Christmas songs, in open tunings
One after another, until figures in white robes appeared
Up to their waists in a familiar river
In the smoked-up windows of the coffee house,
Singing “ Low How A Rose ‘Ere Blooming,”
And he smiled once or twice, like the Cheshire Cat.
“We three Kings,” transfigured
Under the Mixolydian colors of a modal star.

Sometimes he seemed to move through himself
Like the current in that river,
Talking easy to me, every once in a while,
As if we were friends, a slow, droll voice,
German philosophy that I didn’t understand.
Of rivers and religion, how he used to go fishing
For days at time with Bukka White
When the catfish were in bloom,
Bukka White, who told him,
Be careful what you ask for John,
The past is really in front of you, before your eyes,
The future is out behind.
Maybe you need to learn to walk backward
In your own footprints,
Like a Seminole Indian.

“Joy To The World,” finger-picked and syncopated
With a blues turn around and an old-timey riff.
A reverence for the mood, not the holiday,
Whatever brooded over that river
That we have given so many names.
He finished with “Silent Night,” which he played
Like a Hawaiian lullaby with the back of a kitchen knife,
Sliding it up and down the neck of the guitar
That he held tilted on his lap like a baby.

Nice little instrument with some decent sustain,
He drawled, You don’t see many red guitars.
You got a real sweet spot
Up around the tenth fret, on the B string.”
It doesn’t need much tremolo.
You can feel it can’t you,
In your hands and chest
Right through the sound box and fret board?
And I nodded my head,
Even though I didn’t feel a thing.