03-29-2012, 09:08 AM
Leaving aside the obvious exaggeration about all poetry being lies, I felt that this was a poem which had a covering of sadness. Being a natural prude, I jumped on the open legs as just the writer enjoying the thought; and I put that aside, at first thinking of the TV ads where some woman is more or less being shagged by a washing-machine, which I now think a clever adman's trick, judging by the way my one vibrates. So no sadness in all that. I think I felt that it was not so much a picture of the bored housewife, as the image of the woman breaking up. A close relative suffered what is fancifully called the 'baby blues' v badly, so that I or one of my daughters did shifts to keep her company. She actually had a little basement room where the washer was, plus deck-chairs etc, on the way out to the garden, which I loved, but she scarcely saw. I clearly recall her in that room, not looking at toes, but so vague, worried stressed and anxious, plus tired, that she had forgotten that she was there to get some little thing.