Patrick J. O'Kernick



Today, in the shower I didn't sing like I'm supposed to
Lathering the washcloth, I felt contemplative entirely,

felt like a boy
lodged in a tree's high fork
where the branches are cold eternities

and the birds are common men circling
together in that order that emerges
And one among them, a bit ruffled, a bit
portly, probably the group's comic relief,
lands next to me. I can't understand this bird

because it speaks in bird-talk, but it gestures like a crossing-guard
telling me: it's OK. It's clear. I can cross. I should cross
before the next car comes. I say, "Stay with me."

But I know it has to go. Yet I see a conflict
within it, a hesitation: it wants to stay. When it leaves,
I realize, I am OK,
because there was that wanting, even if it constituted
only a minority of its will, there was that wanting.

I had been lathering the cloth for some time
and I was OK,
but I'd be lying if I said it didn't bother me

to have to wash with a rag rather than a loofah,
if I said that my good mood consumed me such
that I didn't for a minute hate myself for having
forgotten to go to Wal-Mart the night before.
But let me lie. I was OK.
They say I have to lie sometimes. They're right.

I should have lied about the bread-making.
See, bread-making was that good thing in my life.

When I punched
the dough I was the Ark of the Covenant
and that yeasty smell rising was King David
dancing just for me. We couldn't even hear his wife protesting--
maybe a muffled: "This drunken tomfoolery
does not befit a king." But we didn't care. I would say,
"Dance, David, dance. That hag's propriety
is what should be censored."

Then they find you
covered in flour and you confess hoping they might forgive
but suddenly bread-making isn't helping you feel
"included" the way it's supposed to.

So they pair you with a friend.
But he's a total nut-job. "How was your day, Alex?"
"Oh, like a middle-schooler
looking at a boob on the internet,
a big mashed-potato boob,
and Jesus peeping out of the areola
like a hunk of beef floating in the gravy..."

And he just keeps talking this nonsense, and it's all
a lot of bargain-bin, pedestrian, prepackaged
angst, and you think,

"Just get over it already," and he says something like,

"Do you ever hear 'Greensleeves' playing in the background of your life?"
And you say, "No." Then he says, "Would you believe
I ogled the Food Network woman's milk-swollen breasts
for an entire half-hour episode?" And you say,

"Jesus. Christ."

Because you know he won't know how to interpret that
and at this point you just want to screw with him because

you should be at home making bread.
So, let me lie. Washing with a rag, I didn't mind.