Laundry


I can smell you still, you know.

The laundry has all been folded
and rests across the bed in piles
of towels, socks and slips,
like patches of a quilt I once imagined
making from the scraps of things
the boys had both outgrown: pieces
of a pattern planned, but never
basted into form. I can remember

when your pile was twice as big 
as mine from working two jobs,
changing twice a day: the first-shift 
shirts, buttoned down and crushed
and stained beneath the arms 
from sweating under gabardine suits
you once said gave a sense of intellect -- 
enough, at least, to satisfy the waitress 
looking for a lunch-break paperback 
or the investment banker wanting poetry. 
The better stories, not on pages, 
but laughed out at stand-up dinners 
as you donned your third-shift overalls
for tuna cleaning late-night on the docks: 
even after soaking for hours in bleach
they still sparkled with scales, 
like sequins on the evening gowns
I used to cut from magazines and paste
as liners of the bathroom drawers.

I liked to press my nose against the cotton,
drape a sleeve across my mouth 
like the Arab women in Life, and wonder
why, though they had all been washed
together, twisting up inside the same
hot water, soaking up the same
detergent, my own shirts 
never smelled like anything 
but soap, while yours, under that clean, 

were salt and binding glue,
diesel and Vitalis, as if my face
were resting soft against your chest
and I could taste the essence of you
melting on my tongue,

and though it has been years
since I have been asleep and heard
the thump of boots pulled off
and dropped, the sigh of overalls
shrugged into a pile on the floor,
or felt the weight of you arriving late, 
bouncing the mattress as you pressed 
and slid your weary muscles
up against my naked back,

I can still smell you in these sheets
and shirts and see the tumbling
of the two of us, the toppling 
of the neatly-folded laundry
stretched across the ready bed.


Ali Fischer