“Days Gone By,” when those cool fingers
Whispered over skin and flesh.
His Mother’s hands fluttered and cooed like birds,
Nesting, conjuring the murmurs,
A light in the palm of the heart, touching,
A rocking softness, before he had words to speak,
A face that he entered,
Bigger than the sun, painted and rouged.
The perfume, the smell of liquor, coffee and cigarettes,
Augured the moistness of lips that parted
And closed, on his neck and chest.
She would cool the kiss with a puff of breath,
Then touch the spot with her forefinger
As if to seal it like Solomon’s Pentagram,
Drawn on his body in invisible ink
That women seemed to notice
When he closed his eyes and curved his long neck
Back and to the side when he played,
As if listening for a voice, the cradled humming,
When the shades were drawn in the darkened living room.
His father worked for the government across the line,
A.J., who sang and played the upright piano,
Laid on those heavy ancestral hands at night,
Who drank and doled out the fruit when his mother left.
John, his hair slicked back with Brillcream.
“Just a little dab will do you,” John Aloysius Fahey.
He raised turtles in a concrete pit behind the house.
When he was little and the night noise had subsided
The turtles used to sing to him of days gone by,
When the Catfish were in bloom.