Page 31 - WTP Vol. XI #6

Washing My Mother
I am trying to get her to take the washcloth,
to wash between her legs when my mother
looks me fully in the face, days from dying,
and announces, after first pointing to the very place I have been trying to avoid—That’s where
you came from, as if I needed this late lesson on the ins and outs of human sexuality.
For a moment I’m stunned—not by what she said, which is fully in her wheelhouse of direct craziness, but by the way she said it, as if needing me
to acknowledge one last time what is primary—
I am your mother, you are my son. As if I am
to think of how I took on my body inside of her and then waited to be called forth—
first my head, then my shoulders, and then this me, washing and drying his mother sixty-five years later.
And when we are done, my mother’s small blue eyes open wider than I’ve ever seen—as if she’s seeing beyond the window her passage out of this world,
the day on its way to drizzling, a mist, soft as baby’s hair, suspended in air, above the pond behind her house.
Cording has published ten books of poems, the latest of which is In the Un- walled City. New work is out or forthcoming in Image, The Common, New Ohio Review, The Hudson Review, Southern Review, AGNI, Shenandoah, Mudlark, The Sun, 32 Poems, and Poetry Northwest. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants in poetry and two Pushcart Prizes.
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