Here We Go Round The Maybury Bus! In A Bath...

Monday means wash day, and Monday means Bus day, and Monday means bath day this week.
Jessica Maybury at Perfect Fouth is behind the wheel, and her desire is to collect poems about bathing. You can see that collection here:
http://jmaybury.blogspot.com/2010/11/poetry-bus-driving.html

I don't often write poems about my mother; my father still manages to remain centre-stage even though he's been dead for twenty-three years. I was going to say I have no idea where this came from, but of course, I do: Rachel's and Enchanted Oak's writing this year has seeped inside me. And Elizabeth, from About New York, has been posting a lot of pictures of her holiday in Florence for the past few days, here:
http://elizabeth-aboutnewyork.blogspot.com/

So, a bath poem.



The Present Tense

I open the panelled door with a key,
let her walk in first to the light bouncing
from the white walls and fresh-washed white tiled floor.
It is a large room, sparsely furnished, wood,
enough. I think, but cannot remember
how many beds there were in the room.
Did I lie beside her this holiday,
or was that Brussels, the double sink?
There are two beds, a double and single.
Who had which? Mother, the single, I think.
I see her propped with pillows, glasses on,
reading another pathologist yarn;
I’m poring over a map and guidebooks
planning the next day’s adventure. Back then
distance was not the sole priority.
In the bathroom is the strangest thing,
a bath little longer than a shower tray
yet deep, like a seat. That night she went first
and sat like a queen, receiving, naked,
submerged only from the waist down.
She loved that bath, for she could do her feet.
My mother is always doing her feet;
the downside of sharing a room with her
the navigating of the renegade
pink foam tubes that cover her daytime toes;
she was a dancer. They lie, floor lost,
I do not touch them, repulsed.
We decide, our tongues acclimatising
to foreign words, that it is a sitz bath.
The fact had popped into my brain, easy.
I did not have to help her into it.
My mother, naked, sitting in a sitz bath
in an Italian city. Widow, white tiles;
one image perfect from those seven days.
I shall wash and dry this picture
so it does not clog with the household dust.
I must make ready for when the day comes.