Posturing

Second to Last: Melville's Pew
Sailors Bethel
New Bedford, MA

Posturing:

Or What’s the Difference

Between Hands and Knees Cleaning

And Down Right End-of-the-Day

Prayer?

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,

dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,

so the eyes could not be seen.

                                                                                This Was Once a Love Poem

                                                                                Jane Hirshfield

Consider this: the positions are the same.

And maybe: the end, our results.

We’re the both of us on our knees

and squeezing the cloth of all

its dirty qualities to wash, in a strict

self-developed code of swirls

so we don’t get lost or block

ourselves into the corner, the spots

off the floor where all our daily lives

drip and fall and splatter in a pattern

that same pattern? No, not possible,

but pattern enough that it goes

noticed as our own life falling

off the edge while we move, clumsy

if given a late night and early morning

its egg white it’s a drip of butter

it’s a grain of uncooked rice or salt. 

It’s mice leaving behind whatever it is

they leave behind.  Up close everything's taken

for what it is and scrubbed at and up

and polished off like supper to the hungry:

not tasted, not savored, only

as thoroughly chewed as can be

swallowed so the going about without it

is easier.  Listen, what I mean to say is

crumble this and crumble that

deliberately and let it fall off the stove

or the table and wait to take it up

cleaning.  Isn’t it, hands and knees now,

keen on being not just the mess you made

but too the knee-boned pressure of sweeping

it toward you to clasp, piled like saints

cards, like intentions, like the two spots

where your praying feet start to take you

down at the bottom of your bed, far

away from the head?   It’s praying.

Plain enough, it’s praying?