Clothesline

Photo:  Martin E. Cobern (Cheshire, CT)

Our clothesline stretched

Between the back porch

And the oak tree 

Twenty yards down

Our gently sloping backyard.

The oak stood eternal and vast

Beside the 1920s stone hearth

We used for a barbecue only once

Because it required so much charcoal.

Our socks and underwear flapped

Over the picnic table stained red

On the brick patio between

The back porch and the Bilco doors,

Under which we stored firewood

For the basement woodstove

During the many years of Dad’s

Lone war against OPEC.

On the other side of the laundry,

Our widowed neighbor wanted 

The peace of trees in the wind, 

Privacy, deep dark, solitude.

Thanks to her acre-square wilderness,

Our laundry dried unseen though we lived

On a very busy road.

When I think of that clothesline on pulleys,

I think of my mother’s hands, raw and red, 

Pulling our laundry from the washing machine

Balling it into a wicker basket, 

Carrying it upstairs and through the kitchen

To the back porch, where she had to stand on her toes 

To reach the line. I think of her shoulders 

As she bore the heft and wet of our bed sheets 

As she pinned them to the line to dry.

How intimately she knew her family,

How humbly she bore our weight:

Every week she took our clothes, towels, sheets

And made them  bright white,

Fragrant, and filled with sunshine.

She knew us well.

She made things right.

She seemed not to mind

That it might take us decades to notice,

That she might not be here for that moment

Of our awareness and the joy of it,

That our embrace–our gratitude–would have to wait.