Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
by Richard Wilbur
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”
Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” from Collected Poems 1943-2004. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted with the permission of Harcourt, Inc. This material may not be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Source: Collected Poems 1943-2004 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004)
11 Comments
Clothesline
ReplyDeleteOur clothesline stretched
Between the back porch
And the oak tree
Twenty yards down
Our gently sloping backyard.
The oak was strong and sturdy
Beside the stone hearth
We never used for barbecues because
It required too 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.
Right now, though,
I am thinking of my mother’s hands,
Raw and red, putting our laundry into a wicker basket,
Carrying it upstairs and through the kitchen.
I am thinking 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 every week she took our clothes, towels, sheets
And made them bright white,
Adding creases or hospital corners.
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 the moment,
That the embrace, the forgiveness, would have to wait.
(Sandy Lee Carlson)
Sandy, your poem is wonderfully descriptive and specific. I feel like I am there in the back yard with the laundry on the line. I especially like your references to your mother’s shoulders and hands, the work that she put into this task, that she seemed not to mind that it would take decades for the thanks and forgiveness to come. Those last lines are poignant and powerful.
DeleteI particularly like the last verse. There is something intimate about laundry. As soon as you start folding someone's clothes, you potentially know more than you want to. I recalled being in the dorm in college, and how you had to pay attention on laundry day, or who knew who was going through your stuff because you were too slow to empty one machine or another. I wouldn't ever touch anyone else's laundry in the machines. I'd sooner wait.
Delete
ReplyDeleteO my Soul
Come blend with me…
Don’t be shy,
no hide-and-seek among the sheets
on the line to dry.
Don’t leave me hanging
to navigate this world without
a spirited wind
to fill my sails.
In-spire me, let me breathe you wholly,
fill me with holy fire.
Anoint my eyes,
my ears, my lips.
Bring in clarity.
Bring up courage.
Permeate my cells,
blur my boundaries.
Widen the circumference
of my heart.
Meet me in a whirling womb-space
of ether and air
where we may
mix and merge
in jubilant co-creation.
O my Soul
Come blend with me.
Julie Cook
Julie, thanks for adding your poetic voice to the conversation. Your poem has me thinking about the feeling of being separated from my own soul at times--a sense of being divided, or, worse, bifurcated without the possibility of experiencing wholeness. This poem, and your poem from last month about your mom, make me think about the maternal creative space and its potential.
DeleteNot what you intended, I'm sure. But as I re-read the first few lines, I saw episodes of the Little Rascals, Marx Brothers, and Three Stooges in among the sheets, getting lost in seas of hanging white, and of kids dreaming of sheets as sails and parachutes, and what might be possible.
DeleteSandy, I am very impressed with your very creative, descriptive and absolutely beautiful poem. It really touched me! Thank you so much for sharing this!. It really makes me think about my Mom and how she always had a hot meal on the table for me and my brother. Regardless of what my Mother was going through with my Dad leaving the family when I was very young, our Mom was always there loving us and doing the best that she could... Thank you Sandy.
ReplyDeleteJulie, Thank you so much for this amazing piece that you wrote. It really resonated with me and my desire to be "burned in the holy fire"! Very moving! Wow!
ReplyDeleteHere is my response (kind of). I focused on "let there be nothing on earth but laundry" from Wilbur's poem, and grabbed on to Sandy's clothesline. It's a bit silly. And it needs some work - I think some line combos fit together and others aren't quite right yet. Feel free to offer your thoughts.
ReplyDeleteLaundry
Oh Lord, was it part of the plan,
After you created woman and man
Shortly after the world began,
To have us, all these years later, do laundry?
Lord, who else should we seek to blame,
For you created the serpent that came
Into Eden, the garden same,
Where Adam and Eve ate fruit, then quickly dressed.
Those fig leaves and loincloths of plants
Weren't nearly as good as a pair of pants.
So with just a few bellowed chants,
You conjured animal skins we'd wash and wear.
In ponds, rivers, tubs, and machines,
We soak and rinse to get everything clean,
Leave it all in the sun between
Or over the ropes of overhead clotheslines.
Oh Lord, here's to your fashion sense,
But some of us are on the fence.
Wash, dry, repeat makes little sense;
We'd like your next clothes line to be self-cleaning.
Ed, I love the wit and the truth of this. (Reminds me of Ogden Nash). You have lots of funny phrases: loincloths of plants not as good as a pair of pants; bellowed chants, God’s fashion sense, and self-cleaning clothes. Through the ages washing clothes has been the most labor-intensive task, and you succinctly get this across by mentioning the ponds, rivers, tubs and machines that have been used. I also love the rhythm and the rhyme in the poem. The last lines of each stanza are a little surprise because they don’t rhyme. Maybe the ones that bother you are the ones that don’t exactly have the four beats in them that all the other lines have. Probably would be easy to adjust to see if that helps.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I think your point about the beats is right. Thanks for taking the time to take a look.
Delete