Passing the Sacrament in My In-laws’ Garage

I wear a paper mask, Jacqui a festive Aloha mask,
and ten feet away, a card table between us,
sit her parents, both in their nineties, maskless,
too hard to explain the what and why
of the wearing, and we’re listening to “All Creatures
of Our God and King” on Jacqui’s phone.
To keep Covid at bay we use the garage
to bow our heads and lift Jesus to our mouths.
I close the garage door for privacy and open
the back door to coax a breeze playing hard to get.
This is the eucharist, Utah style, with me
preparing bread and water, me kneeling
on concrete, and me passing to a congregation
of three, then taking a scrap himself.
The garbage can, big as a witch’s cauldron, squats
behind my left shoulder, shovels and rakes
line the wall like saints, and three boxes
of slug bait on the shelf haven’t killed anything,
with or without bones, since before 9-11.
Dementia and pandemic are the twin enemies.
We curse the latter and downplay the former.
Never mind that whole countries have evaporated
from my in-laws’ memory banks, goodbye
Thailand, so long Peru, also farewell to continental
drift and Bay of Pigs and the faces of three
adult grandchildren who visited at New Year’s.
No more Harriet Tubman or Ruth Bader
Ginsberg, though Fred Astaire still kindles
something—wait, wasn’t he a general?
Jesus, though, is still here, not homemade
or Wonder but a torn English muffin, and soon
he’ll be four trickles of water in Dixie cups.
And He is summer solstice, our longest day
and shortest night, and He is robin and finch
and sometimes an elegant Steller’s jay ricocheting
tree to tree. And He is the hoe that can chop
weeds till sunset and the broom that sweeps
away mouse droppings and dust balls and crumbs,
and He is this sweet tangle of silver white
lights we’ll drape over the flocked tree
come Christmas. Monkey wrench and vice
grips, Selah, tape measure and twine, Selah.
And He is the dusty blue cruiser bike, tires
still good, hanging from the rafters, ready
at any instant to ferry us to the next life.
Till then, we bow our heads to this glorious
broken now and we ask and we ask and we ask.