Am meisten gelesen ▸
Dave Bonta
Lost the letter I in a card game
& wake up still a little drunk.
The sky looks like the proverbial world
of hurt, scarred by contrails that fade slowly,
much too slowly.
Laundry flaps on the line, & I can make out
every word: Red. Black.
Blue. The dark wash.
But where is everybody?
This old light bulb is fresh out of ideas,
even bad ones.
This body wants to be thumbed through
like someone’s bedtime reading.
The kind with covers of broken-down leather,
dog-eared pages edged
in ineradicable gilt –
Hungover
at
the
Laundromat;
everything on spin cycle.
COLD / COLD / MIXED LOAD
An Asteroids arcade game blinks
through its demo. Hand streaks
near the start button are more visible
than the screen. Its counterpart in the corner
is burnt out. Unplugged. Quit on.
Christmas music is four weeks early and I'm kind of singing
with thirteen quarters and two dryers going.
Nauseously, I identify the shirt I'd like to wear
the rest of the day; fading jeans that will soon
fit tight and right, belt-less.
There is a marvellous washing
creamy and snowy-white
hung high on lines
stretched from upper and lower balconies
in the back-yard, across the narrow lane
behind my rusty apple-tree
and dusty lilac hedge;
and a great splendid ‘woman-by-the-day’
comely and fat, with a bronzed skin
and tumbled blue black hair,
and an ugly and joyous scarlet gown,
is hanging out the clothes ...
wet heavy clean white clothes ...
soft liquid splashes of light amidst dull dusty trees
and sombre dirty bricks.
The laden lines begin to ripple seductively
The maid is out in the clear April light
Our store of linen hanging up to dry;
On clump of box, on the small grass there lie
Bits of thin lace, and broidery blossom-white.
And something makes tall Ellen — gesture, look —
Or else but that most ancient, simple thing,
Hanging the clothes upon a day in spring,
A Greek girl cut out some old lovely book.
The wet white flaps ; a tune just come in mind,
The sound brims the still house. Our flags are out,
Blue by the box, blue by the kitchen stair;
Betwixt the two she trips across the wind,
Her warm hair blown all cloudy-wise about,
Slim as the flags, and every whit as fair.
Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army,
And he drew six dollars a month as a pension,
And stood on the corner talking politics,
Or sat at home reading Grant’s Memoirs;
And I supported the family by washing,
Learning the secrets of all the people
From their curtains, counterpanes, shirts and skirts.
For things that are new grow old at length,
They’re replaced with better or none at all:
People are prospering or falling back.
And rents and patches widen with time;
No thread or needle can pace decay,
And there are stains that baffle soap,
And there are colors that run in spite of you,
Blamed though you are for spoiling a dress.
Handkerchiefs, napery, have their secrets—