Dirty Laundry, or My Clothes

It's been called  

a monster. I liken it to a drift  

of snow, but growing.  

Like a dog in the dirt  

like a cat in a box

I dig

for a shirt

and that pair  

of pants that I forgot  

had a hole near  

the crotch.  

Mushrooms of cotton and  

dingy unmentionables.  

Sometimes even clean

and folded. They soon  

enter the fray.  

My thoughts of how you threw me aside

and didn't even let me say sorry.  

How you talk to the children

and look over my head. How I feel  

toppled over, nudged, dug through.  

An unmatched sock, a grease stain

on that heathered shirt.  

I looked up as I walked  

to the car (for the second

time in five minutes) and noticed

for the first time

the ring around the moon.  

Maybe it means  

something, maybe a mariners  

adage I read once,  a Native  

American symbol. A Farmer's 

Almanac entry.  

Ring around the moon:

A halo, a refraction of light. Some think 

it warns of an unsettled season.

I step to our kitchen, sink full of lidded cups  

and small spoons, husband asleep

in bed, my side blank and waiting

and tilt on my axis.  

A speck on a rock, looking up at the moon.  

100 poems, 100 days

I keep thinking about how, after

they ate

the fruit--they didn't lie

to one another. They didn't envy, he didn't reach

out to strangle her

neck, to stop the blood

pulsing there.  

Instead, it seems the snakey lie  

wasn't success,  

money, or last name.  

It was their bodies

that sent them hiding  

in the chest-high bushes. 

They were naked.  

Nipple, hair, crease.  

They were ashamed.  

And after He found them, as the evening cooled, 

(because who could hide from Who Created), 

he shook His all-knowing head at the leaves

cobbled together, tied with vines or stitched with  

fir needles.  children children, 

there's hail, wind and dust.  

He wrapped them in hides, skins to protect

And sent them out to battle this:  

souls and thorns, labor pains, 

one another. To stop  

the blood pulsing there.