BRANDEL FRANCE DE BRAVO After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

—Jack Kornfield, 2001

Window caulk cracking, door padlocked, another laundromat

is closing. How far will people have to drive their dirty

bedspreads? Headlights in daytime, snaking in slow caravans,

black Hefty bags in the backseat, to some suburban strip mall’s

Sit and Spin. My years of hoarding quarters, jam-jar maracas

are over. Wheeling my wet load past oversized peepholes

as I eye the red minutes—over. I don’t have a private

chapel devoted to laundry as seen on HGTV, just

an “in-unit W/D.” And, so must most neighbors. Do I miss

laundromats? Maybe I miss the locker-room-like looking,

the furtive interest surely shared given the rule

to never air. Maybe I miss balling socks, folding

underwear, quickly concealing the crotch, on a long table

where so many strangers’ boxers, night gowns have rested.

Any raised surface can be an altar, a place to kneel

side-by-side, mouths open to receive, eyes fixed ahead,

staring into a sleeve. Another laundromat is closing,

and I’m wistful for some imagined leveling, a there-but-

for-the-grace gone, forgetting there’s always been drop-off

and laundresses like silent confessors to pound stone, wring

river, inhale the steam of hot metal communing with cotton.

From a stacked dryer in the closet, I carry my tangled

heap to the bed, spilling as I go. Is it lonely? Only

as much as meditation. Fishing and folding, I think:

justice like laundry is never over, which feels profound

until in a bookstore I discover I’m not the first

to find wisdom at the bottom of a hamper. Maybe it’s

not how we do it but that we all do, cycling through

the stink and stain of it. An idea so soft from

billions of washings, you can’t help wanting to wear it.

from 32 Poems