The city had such pretty clotheslines.
Women aired their intimate apparel
in the emery haze:
membranes of lingerie—
pearl, ruby, copper slips—
their somehow intestinal quivering in the wind.
And Freihofer’s spread the chaste, apron scent
of baking, a sensual net
over a few yards of North Troy.
The city had Niagara
Mohawk bearing down with power and light
and members of the Local
shifting on the line.
They worked on fabrics made from wood and acid,
synthetics that won’t vent.
They pieced the tropics into housecoats
when big prints were the rage.
Dacron gardens twisted on the line
over lots of Queen Anne’s lace.
Sackdresses dyed the sun
as sun passed through, making a brash stained glass
against the leading of the tenements,
the warehouse holding medical supplies.
I waited for my bus by that window of trusses
in Caucasian beige, trying to forget
the pathological inside.
I was thinking of being alive.
I was waiting to open
the amber envelopes of mail at home.
Just as food service workers, counter women,
maybe my Aunt Fran, waited to undo
their perms from the delicate insect meshes
required by The Board of Health.
Aunt Alice wasn’t on this route.
She made brushes and plastics at Tek Hughes—
milk crates of orange
industrial lace
the cartons could drip through.
Once we boarded, the girls from Behr-Manning
put their veins up
and sawed their nails to dust
on files from the plant.
All day, they made abrasives. Garnet paper.
Yes, and rags covered with crushed gems called
garnet cloth.
It was dusk—when aunts and mothers formed
their larval curls
and wrapped their heads in thick brown webs.
It was yesterday—twenty years after
my father’s death,
I found something he had kept.
A packet of lightning-
cut sanding discs, still sealed.
I guess he meant to open the finish,
strip the paint stalled on some grain
and groom the primal gold.
The discs are the rough size
of those cookies the franchises call Homestyle
and label Best Before.
The old cellophane was tough.
But I ripped until I touched
their harsh done crust.
1995, Sensual Math (W. W. Norton & Company)
Copyright ©:
Alice Fulton
A few random poems:
- Émigrés by Anna Barkova
- Владимир Высоцкий – Старательская
- Telescopes In The Square by Graham Rowlands
- Look You, I’ll Go Pray by Vachel Lindsay
- A Do’set Sale by William Barnes
- About The Nightingale by Samuel Coleridge
- Юргис Балтрушайтис – Море и капля
- The Garden of Janus poem – Aleister Crowley poems | Poetry Monster
- Владимир Набоков – Есть в одиночестве свобода
- The Messiah : A Sacred Eclogue poem – Alexander Pope
- The First Part: Sonnet 10 – Fair Moon, who with thy cold and silver shine by William Drummond
- Percy Janes Boarding The Bus
- Inflexible As Fate poem – Alfred Austin
- A Patch of Old Snow by Robert Frost
- Федор Тютчев – Как дымный столп светлеет в вышине
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- Denner’s Old Woman by William Cowper
- On The Death Of The Vice-Chancellor, A Physician (Translated From Milton) by William Cowper
- Catharina : The Second Part. On Her Marriage To George Courtenay, Esq. by William Cowper
- By Philemon by William Cowper
- By Moschus by William Cowper
- By Heraclides by William Cowper
- By Callimachus by William Cowper
- On the Burning of Lord Mansfield’s Library by William Cowper
- Boadicea. An Ode by William Cowper
- Aspirations Of The Soul After God by William Cowper
- Apology to Delia by William Cowper
- Anti-Thelyphthora. A Tale In Verse by William Cowper
- Answer To Stanzas Addressed To Lady Hesketh By Miss Catharine Fanshawe, In Returning A Poem by William Cowper
- Annus Memorabilis : Written in Commemoration of His Majesty’s Happy Recovery by William Cowper
- An Ode, On Reading Mr. Richardson’s History Of Sir Charles Grandison by William Cowper
- An Epitaph by William Cowper
- An Epitaph (From The Greek) by William Cowper
- An Epitaph 4 (From The Greek) by William Cowper
- An Epitaph 3 (From The Greek) by William Cowper
- An Epitaph 2 (From The Greek) by William Cowper
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works
