Laundry Sisyphus
One must imagine the laundress happy
under the busy street in a steam filled cellar
peering out the dusty pane of a hopper window
to the shoppers above who collect coupons
and stack discount mailers on the counter.
Still, laundry Sisyphus scours common delicates
reeking of lye and blinding with time.
Cold leaching into her bones
strained through aging flesh
like folds of soggy drapery
and the mold growth of buried days
in the vellum rot clamminess.
Burden bound languishing on an endless climb
to a clothesline of fresh air and woolgathering
even if erected on a hilltop like a gallows.
She stands at her lonely hearth
stirring a stewpot of sodden years, refusing to boil.
A lifetime of piled threads
in cauldron caught thickness,
roiling in an endless season of simmering.
Downward gazing, wooden paddle in hand
like some lost oarsman casting about in wine dark seas
sounding for a favored shirt or corpse cloth keepsake.
She sweeps the turbid surface
for a forgotten token
or a lover's favor
before it is clawed under by the craven hands
of a work uniform or blood stained handkerchief.
A washerwoman's albatross of cloth
is absent the grandeur of Atlas
but crushing in the triviality of everyday wear
and cheap fabric tears,
and seam pulls, and patches, and frays.
Holding a life aloft on unsteady arms
a globe of mundane loves and loss,
a crushing current of chafing doubts,
drowning in pelagic undertows of seething cyphers
and unmoored memories.
Oh, to be glass slippered away from the
birthright drudgery of the basement.
Denise Baudu from a Gervaise Macquart.
To burst into bloom in the dry air of sunlight,
free of the chlorine clouds
clinging to the heavy folds of a shabby past
and the embarrassment of off season faux pas.
Instead, a lifetime of stirring, eyes wide
with vinegar tears and starch revelations
granting prognostication at the price
of crone white eyes.
But the truth arrives to no greater gain
than the ammonia piss of childhood strained away
to return again in the volume of age.
Iron salt and cyanide
cut rivulets of Prussian Blue
making a runnel where a brook should be.
And the greatest chiromancer would read lies
in her cracked palms
and the false white facades
of yellowing undershirts
and their sweat ringed pits of toil.
Great torrents of faith turned and twisted
to ebb in fallow fields.
White water tumults
turned to frothy gray effluents
rerouted and dammed
into oxbow lakes of stagnation.
But no amount of Fuller's Earth can absorb
the greasy fingerprints of meager meals
and rendered fat remnants wiped on lapels
and smeared into trouser legs.
A battoir cannot thresh the past from the present,
and no lye can rip the stain from the seams.
