Washing Her Feet

Cut me up and plant me, sunflowers and morning glories rise entangled skyward. 

Oh what did the pigs dream of the night before we cut their throats?

We follow a winding road to the orchard, pick up boxes of seconds, drive back talking about the kids.

What happens next is already happening, this is the secret to inner peace.

In certain critical ways, no longer fitted to the world, and feeling sorrow about it but also ready, okay with it, how it is: this this.

Opening a can of hash by the river, eating it cold, bamboo rod leaning on a rock, evanescent line not moving in the currents.

The stage in darkness.

I can still see the ragged brown sweater she wore when we kissed for the first time, can still remember the absolute – never again repeated – joy of holding her body near mine, folding into her, being enfolded, as if we were one, which briefly we were.

What we replicate.

And now the Lords of War will explain to you how you will die.

Getting clear on what is recursive in us.

The many names for God appearing first as candles, then as the night sky filling with stars, each a clue to what it means to love.

This too shall pass indeed.

Telling Dad a couple days before he died about how Dorothy Day died, and how he called Ma in and made me tell her, and how angry she was, as if somebody – but who – had violated some law upon which her  being depended.

Imagine great birds with great jaws alighting on the crucifix and feeding on his eyes before he was dead.

There is no next chapter, we are hurtling now to the end, we are going to be catapulted into the light in which language is a lesser mode of communion.

Calling Bingo games in the retirement home, first year of law school, the nihilism that would later characterize my forties and early fifties just taking root.

What mattered more, washing her feet or the dialogue that led to her allowing me to wash her feet?

You don’t think about it much, frog-mating season in Florida, but it’s real, it’s a thing.

For Christ’s sake, this again.