Poetry & Links

Laundry

I remember my mother
sorting towels from t-shirts, socks
from sheets. Sorting, she would say
when I asked what she was thinking,
sorting—not worsted wools from lily-
twilled cottons, not gentrified silks
from factory synthetics. She sorted
the difficult from the grays, the loud
from tired yellows.

I remember my mother in the yard,
hanging clothes on a catenary line—
one of the many things she simply
accepted. She would hang the ends
of two sheets with one clothespin
in a breeze, the sheets desperate
across her breasts, their ends flailing
at her hips—she a semaphore,
signaling.

In college, when I couldn’t sleep,
I would ride in a dryer, think about silks,
about wrinkle and shrink. I would think
about my mother as perpendicular line to curve
and myself as round, as tumble—think
how laundry, from sorting to folding,
and especially the missing sock,
explains everything.

  —from The Art of Folding

Amazing

The ability of the human eye to see
and feel is an amazing thing. The ability
of the human eye to see and not feel
is an amazing thing. The ability
of the human eye to not see but feel is
an amazing thing.

Sometimes I quit the ironing, drink
the last drop from my glass and stand
long moments, thinking about folding.
I stumble upon the knowing of my crying
and not crying. I fall and fold, I tumble
into the light of diaphanous forms
that say they can teach me the art
of forgiveness. Crescent, closing, Greta
pulls the curtain. I ask the questions
I asked as a child. I order another round
and make a toast: To the human eye.
It is an amazing thing.

  —from The Art of Folding

The Folly of Half

A man understands the walnut,
how the line of its equator,

like disconsolate lips, waits.
She understands the avocado,
 
sliced from point to round,
how one half falls away

from the pit. She misses it.
She is Muslim-Arab, she is

Israeli. She is a mismatched
sock after all the clothes

are folded. Solomon understands
the folly of splitting the baby.

So it says in Kings 3, in the Qur’an.
Aman is waiting for her mother

to cry out. My ear is pressed
to the belly of the land. I am

listening. Something stirs.
I feel it kick.

—from COME TOGETHER: IMAGINE PEACE. 
Philip Metres, Ann Smith and Larry Smith (eds.)
in the Harmony Series from Bottom Dog Press, 2009.