To Watch His Hands--

My father’s father
Trained his hands with sticks spread across thumb to pinky
To navigate a chord by six.
Sticks and blood, sticks and blood.

He played through the Depression,
Through rotten fruit bereft of bruises
Free from the backs of supermarkets,
Played through train jumping and seeing his brother
Lose his legs.

Raymundo- God of the world on wheels
Sticks and blood, sticks and blood.

Father played until his hands were blue and blood
Crept from his mouth like spiders. Last Rites
In the Sanitarium, three times.
The man, shriveled tuberculin lungs
Shook death, shook death because he heard music.

Saint Cecilia with angels at the piano.
bone and blood, bone and blood.

He rose like Lazarus, tricked death, found he could grow to
Enter women like music and create rhythm in beats inside them.

First Dolores, and great sadness.
Then Alice, Margo, and Regina- my queen.

My father, his daily ritual of scales, fortissimo
through the house. To watch his hands, tender on
Ivory teeth. Headphones--on full blast in his ears with
Franz Liszt’s craziest themes
Reading Goethe, the man’s hands tuned to the beat of the
metronome. All of this for forty-five sustained minutes of daily
Tch, tch, tchs.

He could not caress a child like the ivory, could not separate
The bruised imperfection of childhood to taste the sweet moments
with his own.

My hands are his, sticks and blood tuned to the tch, tch of looms,
The rhythms of Schuman.

When cancer came it left his hands alone. There in the bed
Teaspoons of cold Morphine under his tongue
The liquid of absolution from my hands
To wake the moths of blood from his lungs again.
To let them flutter his soul to a coast I have not seen.

After the first hours of death
I snuck my hands under the afghan that covered him, his
Hands were quiet now, no longer chattering like teeth,
But warm under the blankets, and still
Unresponsive in death.

Sticks and blood,
Sticks and blood.