Her hands tremble slowly,
as they have for the last fifty two years
until their movement,
involuntary,
has become part of her being,
like the face that never smiles
or the eyes that stared only forward
while her lips, cracked and small,
and always silent
lock her dreams away.
She sits most days on the wooden chair with the high back,
built in the Shaker style and stares through the finger printed glass
overlooking the commissary, searching for the face of God.
On Wednesdays, she wanders the grounds
of the hospital with its once manicured lawns,
now in bloom with dandelions,
their whispering puffs of seed blossoms
blowing in the breeze,
as Lady Charlotte, the seventy year old
woman, thinking herself to be a girl of eight
chases after them.
In the evening, an orderly, most likely Charles,
a beautiful Jamaican with dreads tied in a pony tale,
brings her to me.
I slowly undress her, attempting to preserve her
dignity while revealing her nudity
in the shower room of thick gray marble,
its echoing always unsettling to the patients.
Her bones too frail for a shower,
I bath her each evening in
the bathtub twenty years older than she,
filled with tepid water,
the proper temperature important,
never too hot or too cold
always tepid,
so not to awaken memories too painful for tears.
I wash her aged body with soap and a cloth,
but she never moves or acknowledges that I have invaded
her privacy, even when I wash her breast,
small as spoonful, or scrub her behind, before coating it in
ointment and baby powder. Each night I pull the nightgown,
always cotton, its thickness changing with the seasons,
over her wrinkled face still unmoved by
my compassion for her after thirty years of kissing her forehead
after tucking her in her bed. 22 April 2009
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