Pouring the detergent just so, collating the whites
With the whites, and the coloreds with the coloreds,
Though I slip in a light green towel with the load
Of whites for Vivian Malone and Medgar Evers,
Though I leave a pale shift among the blue jeans
For criminals and the ones who took small chances.
O brides and grooms, it is not always perfect.
It is not always the folded, foursquare, neat soul
Of sheets pressed and scented for lovemaking,
But also this Friday, stooping in a dark corner
Of the bedroom, harvesting diasporas of socks,
Extracting like splinters the T-shirts from the shirts.
I do not do this with any anger, as the poor chef
May add to a banker's consommé the tail of a rat,
But with the joy of a salesman closing a sweet deal,
I tamp loosely around tha shaft of the agitator
And mop the kitchen while it runs the cycles.
Because of my diligence, one woman has time
To teach geography, another to design a hospital.
The organ transplant arrives. The helicopter pilot
Steps down, dressed in an immaculate germent.
She waves to me and smiles as I hoist the great
Moist snake of fabric and heave it into the dryer.
I who popped rivets into the roof of a hangar,
Who herded copper tubes into the furnace,
Who sweated bales of alfalfa into the rafters
High in the barn loft of July, who dug the ditch
For the gas line under the Fourteenth Street overpass
And repaired the fence the new bull had ruined,
Will wash the dishes and scrub the counters
Before unclogging the drain and vacuuming.
When I tied steel on the bridge, I was not so holy
As now, taking the hot sheets from the dryer,
Thinking of the song I will make in praise of women,
But also of ordinary men, doing laundry.
Rodney Jones, Elegy for the Southern Drawl
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