"Ablution"-Lovely Poem Honoring Caregivers

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American Life in Poetry: Column 468

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

 

Here’s another lovely poem to honor the caregivers among us. Amy Fleury lives and teaches in Louisiana.




Ablution 

Because one must be naked to get clean,

my dad shrugs out of his pajama shirt,

steps from his boxers and into the tub

as I brace him, whose long illness

has made him shed modesty too.

Seated on the plastic bench, he holds

the soap like a caught fish in his lap,

waiting for me to test the water’s heat

on my wrist before turning the nozzle

toward his pale skin. He leans over

to be doused, then hands me the soap

so I might scrub his shoulders and neck,

suds sluicing from spine to buttock cleft.

Like a child he wants a washcloth

to cover his eyes while I lather

a palmful of pearlescent shampoo

into his craniotomy-scarred scalp

and then rinse clear whatever soft hair

is left. Our voices echo in the spray

and steam of this room where once,

long ago, he knelt at the tub’s edge

to pour cups of bathwater over my head.

He reminds me to wash behind his ears,

and when he judges himself to be clean,

I turn off the tap. He grips the safety bar,

steadies himself, and stands. Turning to me,

his body is dripping and frail and pink.

And although I am nearly forty,

he has this one last thing to teach me.

I hold open the towel to receive him.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2013 by Amy Fleury from her most recent book of poems, Sympathetic Magic, Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2013. Poem reprinted by permission of Amy Fleury and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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"A Grace", Poem by Donald Hall - Grieve Over Unripe Dead

A Grace by Donald Hall God, I know nothing, my sense is all nonsense, And fear of You begins intelligence: Does it end there? For sexual love, for food, For books and birch trees I claim gratitude, But when I grieve over the unripe dead My grief festers, corrupted into dread, And I know nothing. Give us our daily bread. "A Grace" by Donald Hall, from Old & New Poems. © Ticknor & Fields, 1990. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) Donald Hall (books by this author), born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928. He started writing poems when he was a kid at his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire. When he was 16, he went to a writing conference and met Robert Frost, and later that year, he published his first poetry. He moved around for many years, studying and teaching at various universities, and at the University of Michigan, he met another poet, Jane Kenyon, and they got married and moved back to his grandparents' farm. He said that moving there was like "coming home to the place of language." Hall and Kenyon wrote about each other and their life together. Jane Kenyon died of leukemia in 1995. Hall wrote Without (1998) about caring for his wife during her illness and living without her after her death. He also wrote children's books, as well as books about baseball and the sculptor Henry Moore. His most recent books are Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry (2008) and The Back Chamber (2011). He said: "I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems." And, "At sixteen the poet reads Whitman and Homer and wants to be immortal. Alas, at twenty-four the same poet wants to be in The New Yorker."