Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday

I take you late or maybe you take me

taking you into me the way generosity,

that old wolverine sometimes or elder

elephant sometimes takes things to their oil-

well eye and pull it up over over over and over  

in their vicious liquid reminiscence.

I take you in, hand and linen, to the basin

I’ve kept for you and when the room is dim

when the candles hum the soft thrum on

their wick, I sit you down and begin

with the back of your heel, the calloused

cracked- all- winter- long white and dry heel.  I

take you in, thumb over my thumb and rub

and run under the gibbous moon of your ankle

bone--I say: I’ve held you this way before,

remember? or are we both too old now

to know whose foot is whose--whose

palms whose fingers whose soles?  Still

I go slow to the not yet cold water, the green

olive oil I’d warmed before you arrived

and poured easy into the cruet, and whose

appended bubbles are like ones I’d seen

 once above your face in the pond you wanted

to kiss me in--I refused then--and you bent

deep and deeper until the water was glass over you

until the water made me afraid for you and I waded

in and yes it was then, manipulated, I kissed

you, lifted you into me and never once looked

back, until now.  Now the frail tendons are like

aging elastic bands left in the utility

drawer in the kitchen.  They wait, unstretched,

unneeded, drying maybe for years, until a kid

rolls a poster for school...Look: I want my hair

to fall on you again, don’t you?  this moving

with you, oil and water, a white towel,

 this is all we have left.  This washing up after

is all done, after caustic claws and tongues and

trunks, after teeth after arms and legs after

your confession and after mine.  This submits us

both---doesn’t it?  your foot is in my palm now.

It’s frail and trusting as my new blind kitten

dipping its head into the belly of its mother.

We’ve come back to something like that now, old
lovers nosing each other out, blind and only
just breathing.  I’ll bend to you.  No one’s looking.
I’ll bring you up from the bubbles under then rising over
your face, I’ll kiss each of your suspended breaths
one by one, I'll tuck them under my tongue and wash you.

I’ll wash and wash.  God, I’ll wash I’ll wash

I will wash and wash with my teeth, my cheek,

your feet, your cunning, dusty, now in

the palm of my hand come back to me feet.