(Charleston, South Carolina)

How I trail in,
desperate to decode or divine the record
that would open and end
this ancient baptism under a cold fire,
fluorescent light. How I try
and do not matter. How I’m left to depend
on irregularly regressing detail: his flared
boots worn thin,

and their flaps, twisted,
stiff at oblique angles; his jeans darkened
below the knees and corroded
in streaks; or his yellow cap
which still bore, monogrammed
in green, the cheerful hieroglyph of a former
employer. And his foot, under the tap,
unmoving, blistered,

a fat brown eel
against the porcelain; and the purple
wash of blood returning,
veins aligning, in branches under
the chipped-bark skin
of the image of the foot of this man, who
with tap water and coarse hands was trying
to make his body feel.