The Wake And My Father’s Lover - Vic Gamble

at the side of my father’s coffin
button-hole fingers
played another punch-drunk fiddler’s fancy tune
and all the foot-stomping guardian guests,
rosy for booze,
told solemn rosary tales of death
and admired their patent shoes.

“That was a good man”, they whispered ,”good to his wife,
good to his boy, but he had another”

down,
deep inside his well of wood
my father lay & listened,
like an old whisper of fondles echo
and I,
barely big high
as a fireside griddle,
watched the dark rain pepper windowed shadow
on the cold ooze of his eyes,
eyes left roundly scarred
by the weight of old pennies
taken dreamily from grandma’s fiddle-fingered purse.

“That was a strong man”, they
mouthed ”strong for his family,
but he had another.”

that moon that night,
grey brown
as whirled as a tree;
the household dog
grew unsociably friendly
and on my father’s dulled dried lips
long, strange and sophisticated fingers
laid love upon his chill;
we saw those fingers,
we saw her tall
and long and all in black and pretty;
we saw all of this
my saddened eyed mother and I
and we saw all of the sense of this,
the dark shape
holding the chill of my father’s form
inside the veins of her hand.

And when she left,
there was a new hollow in her soft step,
my father’s lover leaving, into the even softer night.

Vic Gamble