After 'Light Wash' 1969
God tempers the wind
to the shorn lamb.
Folding sheets at 3 am
I am reminded of how the
Wind would lift her clean
Wet linens pinned with two
Pins on each end and one for good
Measure near the center.
To be sure of their security
She would throw them over
The line so the rope,
In the time it took the sheets
To dry from morning
Toward night, would insist
The midsection of itself
And assert its mark, a mark
She might use as her dividing/
Divining line when the bed
Got made, a demarcation,
her latitudinal parallel, a 1st night
bride, then night upon night
A first-night bride.
I like the loud sound
Of wind in
Sheets and sails. To me,
It meant the purpose
Of pinning was simply that:
A purpose. But a
purpose worth
Berthing. Five pins,
eight,
Ten, limited only by the number
And the length of the clothes-
Line he'd strung for her.
Battened, it didn’t matter,
If a fierce enough wind found
Its way up and into the cup
Of that fitted
Sheet, something eventually
Was going
to come
undone. But before it
Did, she pinned. She pinned
And she pinned. She
slipped extra
Pins between her teeth, sucked
At the cedar and the spring,
The weathering and seasons of them.
Parallel lines of sheets,
six or eight deep. Big family.
Three babies. One scrub tub.
I see her between each blowing sheet
Her blowing hair stands, trying
to come undone, thrust back
Under the bandana. It
was red,
That bandana. It and
she were
In between these lifting/
Receding waves of wet effectively
Wrung clean. It was her, a moving feast,
Jupiter's Io between the lines, or a
Sentry from one post to the other
Groping for the pole to raise
The wet heft from the drag
And like a joust, walk it, trot it
Run it into the center of its
Crotch to gather it, lift it,
From the ground, gift it
Its only hint, stiff pins yes,
Those stiff, stiff pins, pinched
Against the whiff and whisper
Of wind
