Householder

Householder

4:30 am, I’m not getting up because it’s too early. I turn the pillow four times hoping for who knows what comfort. The smell of the sheets surprises me — slightly sour, salty like soup. I could say I’m being called to wash them, remnants of my childhood where no sheets went more than a week unwashed, & with all the graham crackers I ate in bed, my sheets needed washing or vacuuming at least. Household tasks, particularly laundry, always soothe me. I have a washer & no dryer, so when fog settles, I bundle wet sheets into my car & drive to the laundromat. I bring William Carlos Williams to read while the sheets tumble, his memoir of his European/West-Indian mother who lived with him until she died, “sat in her room year in and year out” because she walked to the Club, “without rubbers,” slipped & fell on ice, broke her hip. Elena was nervous, vain & timid, tough & good, & Williams loved her. Sons are like that, not seeing us as slightly sour, overly salty, instead as interesting, kissable, worth cooking dinner for. In one poem he described dancing naked in his attic while the family slept, happy genius of his household. I quit the laundromat with slightly damp sheets, air them dry in late day sun.

Ada Limón

Ada Limón [Monterey Peninsula College]

from Ada Limón's Bright Dead Things:

Long Ago & the Cow Comes Back

In this, the current recasting of the great plummet,
it is I, and not the other grand-eyed cows off Leveroni Road,
who watches the two cloudy youths climb into the backseat
of the long boat-like car during the plunging dark hour
of no turning back. I am not folded into its tongue-red
interior watching the headlights of the passing traffic
trance the windows like far-off lighthouse lights pulsing
at us, lost in our swollen inky sea. In this version, I am
the still bovine beauty staring into Carringer Creek, hungry
for nothing but what comes every day: grass and sky,
and the silvery creek water reflecting the grass and sky.
By the bend in the clean zipper of stream, by the gate
of my life, a metal animal’s insides steam up and I understand —
so many dolorous selves in each of us dissolving into fog.