Washing Zooey
- Washing Zooey
When you collapse beneath my hands in the tubI whisper to you as if you're my child. I tell youI can make you clean. You strain your bones, thinas popsicle sticks, cry in your no-language. Firessomewhere far reach us with their particulateand the news reports advise against breathing.Your breath rushes beneath the pour of warmsoapy water getting darker as it washes over you.Your breath, it seems, will not last forever.It's amazing either of us has made it this far.There are some kinds of lonely that make senseand I think of all the people I could blame it on.God is closer and farther than She's been in agesand I wonder if you'll survive this washing, if I mightaccidentally drown you trying to make you new.You don't have to let me do anything. I'm goingto do it anyway, rub the soap into your fur, hold youwith one hand under the shoulders, your headsmaller than a tennis ball shaking side to side,and you shiver so hard as if trying to leaveyour body, leave the warm water rinsing the dirtthe ash from your face, body, legs, and tail.You might think it's yours, this dirt, but it isn't. [End Page 87]
Matthew Siegel is the author of Blood Work, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection from the Forward Arts Foundation in the UK. Siegel's poems and essays have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Cincinnati Review, The Guardian, PBS NewsHour, San Francisco Chronicle, Tin House, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, Siegel received an MFA from the University of Houston. He currently is a Professor of Humanities and Sciences at San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
