Maundy Thursday
Hungover on this cloudy Thursday morning
when it seems that everyone I know has given up
or cut way down on alcohol,
I stare at dust streaks on the ceiling
and recall Miss Maudie
characterizing Mister Radley
as a foot-washing Baptist.
Say what you will say about the man,
but he washed someone else’s feet,
which tells me almost all I need to know
about his estimation of humility.
I brush my teeth and fix my hair
with half a comb and faucet water,
and I drive to where the people mill
outside the beige-brick building
in which lower-order angels
who have problems of their own
give methadone to struggling humans.
Window down, I pull up to the curb:
“Does anybody want their feet washed?”
One man says, “Ten bucks.”
“This isn’t a perversion. It’s an act of love.”
“Ten bucks.”
“It’s Holy Thursday. Easter’s almost here.”
“Oh, Easter’s almost here?”
I nod.
“Are you the Easter Bunny?”
“No.”
“Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?”
“No.”
“Ten bucks.”
I drive away and vaguely wonder
if the prevalence of sandals
in a desert culture would confer
on such an offer more appeal.
I park beside a restaurant on the riverfront
across the river from the town I came from
and remember a forgettable alumnus
who makes decent money on the side
by posting photos of his feet online.
The sun shines on the river in a way
that makes it seem like schools of fish are jumping,
and I realize that while my mother was
alive, incapable of caring
for herself, I should have kneeled
from time to time, short-circuiting
the inexplicable revulsion
that was such a sin now that I think of it,
and laved her tiny feet and clipped
her curling toenails and applied
a fungicide with great reviews
and told her with a smile every time
she asked as though it were the first time
that I was her oldest son.
Tinkering
The day I am supposed to meditate
on Jesus lying in the tomb
I sweep the patio of seed husks
and the maple blossoms strewn
like little flaming hearts that fell out
of the open chests of micro Jesuses
who for mysterious reasons
had lain prostrate on the branch tips
various feet above the patio and drizzled down
these gruesome messages of love.
My wife, now clean and sober
for as long as Jesus fasted in the wilderness,
is at her Buddhist 12-step group
because she doesn’t care for AA’s higher-power
vibe and how the members
keep rehashing personal implosions.
We’re supposed to kiss to punctuate
departures and arrivals now,
and I still taste her lip gloss
as the sun shines on this Saturday,
which makes it difficult for me
to visualize the temporary corpse
of Jesus lying, laved and linen-wrapped,
in darkness on a limestone ledge.
My cell phone on the table pings.
I lean the broom against a chair
and see a dot that is my wife
progressing homeward from the temple,
so I close my eyes and meditate
on Jesus as a dot
approaching the conclusion
of the unrecorded years, descending
on a footpath from a monastery
in the Himalayas, tinkering
with the parable of the mustard seed
the whole way down the first leg
of the long walk back to Galilee.
Siren
Not far off the trail, blown snug
against a downed tree and the ground,
a blue that doesn’t naturally occur
around here catches April
sunlight just right, signaling
like someone stranded on an atoll.
I’ve handled mylar in this form
so many sylvan times before
that I’m aware DuPont invented it
in 1952 for applications
that did not include enlivening occasions
and festivities with shimmering balloons.
I shake this one and fold it,
puncturing the mylar
with my house key where it’s taut
with what is left of helium or air,
and picture how the knot that moored it
to the red flag on the mailbox
loosened in the light breeze and gave way
or how a child lit up by the novelty
of turning three let go of it by accident
to hug a relative and watched
this symbol of his birthday rise,
the sliver of a ribbon dangling,
teaching an inevitable lesson
on the nature of goodbyes.
The mylar crinkles in my pocket
as I weave back to the trail
and step my pace up to a saunter.
Always at this stage I think
about the beaked-whale calf
atwirl in the Atlantic Ocean,
not a care in the aquatic world,
before a mylar iridescence
undulating in the water
caught her eye and beckoned
like a jellyfish or squid.