KIM WELLIVER
Mr. Driesbach's Bath-Day

"Don't get shirty with me!"
I almost bray when he says it,
tangle my tongue around the sound,
screw my lips tight
as he mouths words
incongruous
as the black & white celluloids,
and plugged nickels
from a decades dead boyhood.
 
"Don't get shirty with me!"
as though he can parse
dignity from grandevity;
puddled naked in his bathchair,
seeking some indelible nobility
from wattled neck-skin
scrawny shank's
mosaic of liver spots.
 
I lower him,
loose as a crumpled bag,
into vapor and steaming water.
Pink the milk-pallor of his
sunken chest, the slack belly
lapped over buttresses
of pelvic bones,
his flaccid penis
in its sparse nest.
 
Flares of a man twenty years gone
spark in hard blue eyes,
pulse his coda
between lashless lid-blinks.
 
His mouth works dry white phlegm,
eats the gristle of age,
the abasement of diapers
& bathchairs, croaking
naked against my starched breast
 
"Don't you get shirty with me!"
I mumble, "No sir,”
soap his spine.