When was sorting laundry written

The coffin slides through low brass doors. We troop to her old flat, repaired, and toast her soul's lone journey through the snowy skies. The rest will go beneath a churchyard stone. Washington, In this wind swirling white I seek her still, and still the night is blind. My attempts to fix her life in words freeze, then melt with flakes of snow. Yet, as if these were the drifts that cloak the stone above her distant sack of ash, I keep on shoveling.

Strangely, suddenly, beating like surf that splashes now over bulwark and dock, shock troops of hurricanes farther south but on course to crash here. My heart was always docile, ignored as it pumped full, ebbed on schedule, pulse normal, blood salty as sea, relied on, like seasons and tides. And all the recurrent seasons of love which jumpstart body and brain— What's happening now?

I don't know. Such pounding, invisible crimson surf. Take care! This casket of flesh and bones could shower your green world red. To get a crack at immortality: leave better work.

Stop hanging out the wash…Yet life eclipses literature. On the line, a spider spins her web between the lover's shirt and a black lace slip: an untold tale. The three-year-old, pumpkin-haired, sprints at billowing sheets: this Don Quixote writes his own book. A puzzled hummingbird probes crimson blossoms on the waving blouse— Merely blood from punctured skin.

Red ink of malignancy? Best tend to the garden where summer's last tomatoes hang. Quickly plant before first frost winter spinach, lettuce, chard… Who will be here to harvest? Hang the world, over-rife with growth and love and fear and death. While waiting for the wash to dry, the phone to ring, write.

A real big mother of a snapper impervious to poison ivy, briars, lumbers up the river bank. Shell slate black, crenellated at the stern, snake neck, scaly limbs, hook claws, horny beak to sever fingers or a foot.

A dozen rabbits race about, skitter, bound, zigzag, scatter among tiger lily clumps. Still, I bet on her. She heads straight. She pauses on the grass. Was there a house across her path before? I offer her my pear core, sprint aside. She studies me: with loathing, mere disdain, slow-stirred memory of a duel beneath primordial cycads, or am I the perfect meal? She's hellbent not on making war or lunch but to unload her oblong leather eggs in some cache underground.

Now where…. I edge behind, lift her gingerly— not only dangerous, she stinks— carry her to an abandoned flower bed. She takes off, a millstone on the march, around the yard's perimeter at such a pace, distracted by the rabbits, I lose track. She grunts through the herb bed, crushes dill, churns the earth between oregano and rosemary. When I check again, she's covered up whatever spot she finally chose, slid down the bank and disappeared. How did that repellant hulk entice a mate so tolerant of her appearance, scent?

Was he drawn by long affection or, with pure chelonian lust, snatched the first female to swim past. Love in the muck in the dark or light of the moon on waves,. Like roaches, snappers may outlive us. Unsure of their gestation span, I'll watch the spot, escort phalanxes of hatchlings to the shore, ward off ospreys, foxes, gulls…. But this very night, raccoons search among the herbs, leave shards like broken ping-pong balls.

Around it she builds a wall too high for wingless insects to cross, they keep tumbling back in her moat. She crowns the crest with a feather. The sun, hidden by fog curling over the shore, enfolding wavering figures in scrim, still pours onto our heads. Observing death waft in quietly,. When we leave the beach all that's left are footprints, finger trails, traces of moat, rays of recalcitrant light. You'd say, they are real: the child digging clams in wet sand at low tide, the boat in the cove, two canvasbacks overhead.

The glint of a winch makes the boat seem substantial but the sun will climb into a cloud, the boat spiral in waves and sink. The child, who dreamed herself somewhere and someone else, also may vanish, perhaps in the tide,.

Who knows if she's sweet or mean, that wrinkled woman in shapeless black stirring soup for the child, if she was a general's widow, or mistress,. Or if the old man nodding over his bowl was the one or one of the ones, if he marched on to raze a village or home to tend his chickens and cows.

Was this house in his family for generations or just occupied when its owners fled or died in the yard? The town was destroyed. What lies under fields beyond? The child spoons the soup. An elf found you under a berry bush. They quiz him on sums and saints, complain the storm is prying the shutters off, then, mulling their own recollections without speaking, finish the soup.

Is he foundling, or grandchild, of the clan or alien blood? War weaves shrouds of silence around corpses and quick alike. We back away from the window, refasten the shutter, disappear into the storm. The fragrance of soup and blood clings to our clothes. Like St. Jerome, we need to keep pet lions dozing by our beds, their paws upon our coverlet while we're asleep.

Affectionate despite the claws. They lull us with deep regal purrs and guard us with their locomotive growl. Lions were smaller in the time of saints or in the artist's eye that had not seen real lions in savannahs, stalking, quaintly feasting on fresh antelope, bloody, lean.

True, table manners aren't well-bred. Housebreaking them becomes a chore. But why stare at a long-dead human head? You won't find your live lion a bore. For when we meditate upon a skull we only learn what's in our own. We quickly learn what lions mull while they lick our cheeks: fine bones. I snap the geraniums in ASP black-and-white since that's in my camera. They catch sun from snow piled outside. In my bay window they glow what my mother might call rather a brazen scarlet.

Each single floret is tiny, fragile, but massed in a greater sum, big as a fist, they burn my palms with their light. Even when petals shrivel, officially finished,.

Yet they print mere icicle gray. One would suppose, seeing this glossy photo, my geraniums pink, sappy lavender, white. These leaves velvet green, must explain.

My mother, whose birthday should be today, insisted on positive attitudes. Oh, I can tell they are red, she would assure me. At the present time, Ritchie lives in Maryland and is working novel, as well as, making progress on new works of poetry Chen.

The poem moves in and out of metaphorical comparisons of love and laundry to imaginative and amusing observations of everyday life. Thank you, Lizzie! Elisavietta herself Oh, and if you can, change "Russian immigrant" to "Russian emigre". In this case, thousands left Russia during and after the Revolution of , and while many, such as my father, started at the bottom of the economic ladder he worked in an auto body repair shop while preparing to work his way through Yale , they considered themselves "exiles.

Post a Comment. The speaker then observes the "many shirts and skirts and pants" that move weekly through the wash "head over heels.

The speaker then comments on the many socks that she put "into the foam" together "like those creatures in the ark," but after the wash, they are "uncoupled," and her tasks is to make them "paired" again. Sometimes items shrink, but through sentimentality, they find those items hard to part with "even for Goodwill. The speaker then remembers all the times she has been confronted with items left in pockets that unintentionally went through the wash. They all clink on the "enamel" inside the wash tub: matches, screws, paper clips still attached to "dissolved" paper "clogging the drain.

She also finds money, "well washed dollars," still "legal tender" still "intact despite agitation. This poem was written well before the Iraq-Kuwait War.

Kuwait, before this war, was an oil rich cosmopolitan country, here signaling expensive, fine gold jewelry. Poetry Foundation. Winch's speaker plays with the notion that things in the past were better; it was especially better that people felt safe in the past but not in the paranoid present. The poem features three free verse paragraphs versagraph s and becomes particularly erudite in the final versagraph with its allusions to classical mythology and historical figures.

While the poem is primarily lighthearted and fun, it does offer a serious undertone. The grotesque but ever present past vs present comparison does rise to a laughable level, which does not ultimately prevent appreciation of the poem qua poem.

No one is safe. The streets are unsafe. Even in the safety zones, it's not safe. Even safe sex is not safe. Even things you lock up in a safe are not safe. Never deposit anything in a safe-deposit box, because it won't be safe there. Nobody is safe at home during baseball games anymore. At night I go around in the dark locking everything, returning a few minutes later to make sure I locked everything. It's not safe here. It's not safe and they know it.

People get hurt using safety pins. It was not always this way. Long ago, everyone felt safe. Aristotle never felt danger. Herodotus felt danger only when Xerxes was around. Timotheus, however, was terrified of storms until he played one on the flute. After that, everyone was more afraid of him than of the violent west wind, which was fine with Timotheus.