I

Often he is still in the oil-stained khakis
he wears to check seals, monitor pressure,
temperature, flow-rates at the plant.
In January the sun already cowers
behind buildings, streets
cast with complex shadows 
by the time his headlights
sweep the backyard.
She is waiting.

Earlier his sister, his wife or both 
helped his broken mother
down into tub water that is
by now no longer a balm
to hips, ribs, shoulders.

Once in the tub, she can not
get back up, is too much
to tug up into stand.
So she waits for her son.
Before he goes in, the women
drain the tub, drape her in the 
threadbare decency of a towel.

The one she bore arches over her,
works one arm beneath
her wrinkled thighs and buttock.
She smells of wet leaves and ginger,
clings to him, withered arms
wreathed around his neck. Feet dangle. 

There is a touch of grey 
around his temples where the veins
pulse like lightning in the effort
of lifting her up from her bath, 
that prime comfort she claims, 
that which no one in the family
will deny her. As he lifts  
in a sort of reverse Pieta
his mother’s breath is on his neck.

He pauses for a second, 
steadies himself, then carries her
out the door the way a groom
would cross a threshold in movie scenes 
she saw when she was young.
She smells like wet leaves and ginger.

		II

If there are prayers written
by any Thomas – Aquinas or Cramner –
that are more reverent than this
I do not know them. They 
are absent from my tongue. 
Let them stay in the silence
from which right prayers rise.
Let prayers go unsigned.