Dirt

As a lad I rebelled against my mother’s torturous
ear-digging and washcloth abrasions, soap-blinding
and upbraiding me for not doing it better myself;
back in those days when grandma’s beads
darkly pearled my neck lines, and the grass
stained straight through my blue jeans
into the knobs of my knees, and cuts and scrapes
were debrided painfully by my mother’s hands
that one summer evening delicately plucked,
head and all, a tick from my five-year-old prick.
As a father myself, years later, without thinking a whit
I wiped snot from my son’s button nose
and flung it deep into the sands of the sandbox.
My wife, his mother, was known if he had a cold
even to suck at his nostrils when he was an infant
and spit the slime away. But mothers are mothers
and giving birth is not for the squeamish. That
nose-sucking custom, I should say, is something
they do in Japan, where my wife’s from,
and maybe in other far-off lands, but we do such things
with our own and not someone else’s little brats.
On the playground I watched their snot ball up
and string out as they played with their plastic trucks,
and their mothers chattered on as I grew annoyed
at the neglect, but the strings just dropped into the sand
and made tiny clumps not unlike brown-sugary nubs.

When I was depressed, I was a lackluster bather. I flossed,
I brushed with vigor, I wiped my ass until the tissues
came away clean, but in the shower I’d make a few
haphazard passes then pronounce myself done. My skin
was a screen for rotating horrors: rashes, permanent grit,
scabs and scab-shadows, blemishes, pits, scars, boils,
tar-flecks as if I’d swum in the Gulf, flea bites
from sleeping with dogs who also hated to bathe,
ant bites wet from rapid-fire scratching,
moles, flowering bruises, whole constellations of stains
and ugly wounds. Who needs to needle tattoos?
Stop bathing and grow your own. Dirt was my aura,
all my society as such; I confess I was insane.

*

Ok, I exaggerate a bit in the second stanza: I was feeling Rabelaisian, just for a moment.

Although it's been years since I read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, the novel passed through my mind the other day. I remembered how Esther Greenwood stopped bathing as she descended into her madness. When I was seriously depressed, repetitive chores seemed existentially dreary -- more than usual, I mean. Why bathe, change your clothes? -- you'll just have to bathe or change all over again in 24 hours, again and again and again. The healthy mind knows how to float above such small concerns; the ailing mind is trapped in them.