Shower

In her illness
Elizabeth believes we do this deliberately,
the washing of her body.
She blames me,
her Japanese daughter-in-law
for having made keeping her clean a fetish.
Angry, she says we do this to torment
her soul, the shower a hot
spray of needles we subject
on her moon-colored skin.
She hates it even more
if I’m there to wash her.
She wants her son,
the person she thinks of these days
as her lover, or husband, or father.
Memory and privacy,
she cries at their loss
as I soap her down like an old car.
What protestations!
And as I listen to her,
I think of these bodies
we have given so freely to men,
yet feel ashamed of
when in the eyes of another woman.
How she fawns
when she thinks a man’s around.
Today, she bangs the walls.
“I hate you! The water’s too wet!”
Hanging onto the safety bars,
she pitches back and forth
like a child,
wanting to be let out at the gate.
I wash her back.
She spins around
in my soap-lathered hands,
and loosening her face in mine,
she glares.
She sticks out her tongue,
and biting down on it, she squeals,
jowls swinging, arms jiggling.
Then, in a dive of both hands
between her legs,
she drops to a semi-squat, simian posture
and thrusts her pelvis bones forward
like mountains in an antediluvian upheaval.
In a gesture of obscenity,
she unfolds her petals
and displays her withered sex to me—
the same way boys moon, flip the bird
or grab their crotch and waggle their tongues—
the profane she feels but can’t articulate.