T.

My Mother's Laundry

Order began under the cellar clothesline

where she shook each spun article

once, clipped it to rafter-strung rope.

All winter the bellowing furnace

let out its roar, its wooly breath.

My father didn't believe

in tumble dryers, and Mother, washing

for nine, hung each day's eighteen socks

with a frown. Here was a lesson

for six daughters, where sorting began,

the sets and subsets—

pants, underpants, underground.

First March morning hinting sun

she trudged loads

up the unforgiving stairwell

to wires stretched above winter's wrung grass.

Never like that, she would gesture

south to neighboring lines

where nameless clothing dried

clumped, haphazard wads.

And never leave it out after dark.

My father's bleached shirts billowed an absence

his hovering death would embody, rumor

of cumulonimbus  on the horizon,

urging thunder.

The new appliance, bumped down the back steps

by my brother, vented for all eternity

to the elements, was feeble consolation.

(Appeared in Poets West, 1998.)