The Everyday Housewife

[Roy Hobbs]

She watches clothes dry
through plate glass,
adjusting her physical being--
legs open and arms folded,
gives in to discursive thought.
So perceptive this watcher
of scramble, but without care
to know formal tensions
going on inside the dryer.
Suffused with powerful
feeling tones, she becomes
absorbed in tumbling whites--
socks, t-shirts, panties, towels,
dish cloths and table cloths,
fixed, to an extreme verge
of bicameral consciousness.
At such basement moments
water pipes, hot water heater,
junk in boxes fade. The lawn chair
she sits on, little tactile substance.
Yes, even the Maytag dryer
itself exists only to the extent
a listless, circling panorama
therein housed.
Her world is radically
foreshortened to immediate
experience of garments dancing,
dancing, circling, tumbling--
but not joyously rising and falling,
never singing, but ending
in a pointless crumbling heap;
all spontaneous life,
all wetness gone to dry.
Today she went again
to the basement to watch
clothes dry, but there was nothing
inside the dryer.
She sat there
looking at her toes.