Laundry Room Prayer

From the warm, stilled drum I retrieve and fold
Our clothes in blue-gray morning light in the
Mud Room. Mud Room, we call it the Laundry Room,
But our friends on Maryland’s eastern shore,
From a point back when we were just started,
Used Mud Room, and it reaches the page while
Folding this meditation of when you
Asked where I was and I said, “Here I am.
In the Laundry Room.”
                                         The clothes taken out
Get folded in half and sometimes in thirds,
Depending on their being t-shirt or
Polo or button-up or shorts or socks
Or underwear. Underwear, you’ve a cairn-
Like stack because you stayed longer at the
Beach after we headed home because your
Friends arrived for their annual respite,
The three of your last names sounding formal
As law when arranged together just right.
This cairn is also made from a purchase
You paid for new intimates. Same angles
Though patterned with different colors and prints.
You find me in the laundry room to say
Goodbye, so you can take a jaunt, gather
Up our kids from basketball camp, and
You say you hope the new purchases work.
Then, you pay me two quick, playful kisses,
Still fully feminine and wonderful,
Even when, if not because, we are now
Nearly Twenty years enfolded as one.
After you leave, that piece “Folding Laundry,”
Which has tumbled around in my head this
Cycle, gets further impressed on my bones so that
The cairn of your threads seems right for an altar
To you who have been like clothing upon
This man’s whole self.
                                        Yet I know that such a
Memorial would mean the worst of things,
That memory of you was all I had
To fold and refold. For what is mem’ry,
Stitched with real things as it can be, when
Counted against the holy, living you?

Print