musée mia burrus

the laundry goddess

 
 Remembering Wash Mary
  
           ‘Mary came to wash for Mother every Monday.’
                                                             Emily Carr
                    ‘Outside the open window
             The morning air is all awash with angels.’
                                                             Richard Wilbur
 
  
 Wash Mary’s soul
 slips in at dawn
  
 no showy, blowy 
 thing but true
  
 two-handed
 wingless seraph
  
 (the snowflake
 not the swirl
  
 the ash-marked 
 renunciant
  
 of the world’s
 vain glories)
  
 baskets, sink and pump
 arms bare to elbows
  
 she bends in work
 in clouds of steam
  
 the copper gleams
 tub and washboard
  
 sweat and suds
 washboard and tub
  
 and she beats
 the shirts and sheets
  
  
 beats as angel’s wings
 sound the morning air
  
 the wringer wrings
 the pulley sings
  
 the little clothespegs
 wait the chance to dance
  
 Neruda’s proffered gift 
 the wish of labour lightened
  
 ask the woman 
 is it light, your load
  
 is your value scant
 though you sing a hymn
  
 and set out pure angels
 to bless the waking bard
  
  

Richard Wilbur, former poet laureate of the United States, wrote the fabulously titled ‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World’, evoking the angels on the clothesline. But what of the ‘rosy hands in rising steam’? What of Emily Carr’s ‘Wash Mary’? Did she, sounding the pulley, think of angels? What of the wringer and washboard, angel killers? Pablo Neruda praised ironing as poetry. The disembodied ‘hands are creating the world’ in the ‘skirmishings of the laundries’. Neruda hoped his gift of poetry would lighten the load of those ‘shuttered hearts’, labouring unsung. Did he ever ask?

This draft of a poem for the washer woman was made of couplets that arose in no particular order, then were cut up and suitably arranged – for now.