"To A Daughter Leaving Home"~~~~~"Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins~~~~~"Dream of Fair Women"~~~~~"Crossing the Bar"~~~~~"Sorting Laundry"~~~~~"Siren Song"~~~~~"Curiosity"~~~~~"Mirror"~~~~~"Death of a Soldier"~~~~~"One Perfect Rose"~~~~~"A Constant Lover"~~~~~"A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning"~~~~~"Get Up and Bar the Door"~~~~~"Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink"~~~~~"Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?"

Sorting Laundry

Folding clothes,

I think of folding you

into my life.

Our kind-sized sheets

like tablecloths

for the banquets of giants,

pillowcases, despite so many

washings, seams still

holding our dreams.

Towels patterned orange and green,

flowered pink and lavender,

gaudy, bought on sale,

reserved, we said, for the beach,

refusing, even after years,

to bleach into respectability.

So many shirts and skirts and pants

recycling week after week, head over heels

recapitulating themselves.

All those wrinkles

to be smoothed, or else

ignored; they're in style.

Myriad uncoupled socks

which went paired into the foam

like those creatures in the ark.

And what's shrunk

is tough to discard

even for Goodwill.

In pockets, surprises:

forgotten matches,

lost screws clinking on enamel;

paper clips, whatever they held

between shing jaws, now

dissolved or clogging the drain;

well-washed dollars, legal tender

for all debts public and private,

intact despite agitation;

and, gleaming in the maelstrom,

one bright dime,

broken necklace of good gold

you brought from Kuwait,

the strangely tailored shirt

left by a former lover.....

If you were to leave me,

if I were to fold

only my own clothes,

the convexes and concaves

of my blouses, panties, stockings, bras

turned upon themselves,

a mountain of unsorted wash

could not fill

the empty side of the bed.

Elisavietta Ritchie