Clothesline

Clothesline

Death is drawn to sound

like a slipper without a foot, a suit without its wearer,

comes to knock with a ring, stoneless and fingerless,

comes to shout, without a mouth, a tongue, without a throat.

Nevertheless its footsteps sound

and its clothes echo, hushed like a tree.

                                                                                Death Alone

                                                                                Pablo Neruda

And maybe if death had some quiet time it would

sound like laundry hung out

on a windless day, and the way the line's

weighted with all that wet drag

sags into a pout, sags like the scar

under the lip of her belly

how the mouth of it when it was first

stitched looked like a flat line,

same as the cut going in, scalpal a plow

blade on the chaste prairie, the just before going in

sound, the glance out over

the sky and whatever color it was

when she watched the sun come up

the morning she killed herself. 

I think of her sometimes being

like the clothesline and not the laundry

she’d hang day after day

in everything but rain

how without the pole to hold it

up, the jeans would drag in the grass

and if they stayed the knees

maybe (if it were just a load of jeans)

and the cuffs too would come in

damp and cold and stretch that rope

and pull down the frame and the posts

so that eventually they were two soldiers

going off on their own after they’d solved

the small matter of their each insulted honor.

Holding up under it all, if there was one

thing I thought walking under

that clothesline to her at-home grave, it was

how straight he’d made the frame again

and maybe they were even new

poles and one still not completely stripped

and a long tongue of bark lifted and sank,

lifted and sank like a little girl’s bangs

in the wind, sometimes jubilant, sometimes

exhausted against the skull.  Now the rope

goes straight across, and actually it all

looked brand new, like it had never been used,

and I wonder if she watched him take it

all down and cut it up, the chainsaw ripping

into the old gray logs like they might’ve been

skimmed cream.  They were so old I know I’d scratched

some boy’s name in one, down by the dirt

so it wouldn’t be seen, and I remember

how a stray cat lifted his tail and peed

against it and I wondered if it was an omen

of things to come.  And I wonder if she thought

he was taking that away too

and made her stay inside once and for all—

but she waited and watched him cut the logs

into firewood and then the man next door

who’d been skidding logs for weirposts

brought four of the straightest poles she’d

ever seen, dragging them behind his machine

and across the field, she’d known

for a while now would be her grave (she’d

already talked to Jonathan, the mortician

she told me one day when I called).

But not today, not today, because he was making her

a whole new frame, she'd waited years

she must’ve waited long after I’d left

and stopped noticing the grey weathered legs

the silence of their soldier sag, and I wonder if, maybe,

maybe, if on that morning she’dve been facing

that way as she started to step into her death

she could’ve seen them waiting for her, six rows

of rope straight as the poles.  Pins stiff fingers

in the fog that was lifting from the lawn.

But she wasn’t facing that way.  She couldn’t

have been.  Because what purpose trumps pills

but children needing clean jeans?  Look out the window—

it could be row after row of them

in the cold, lifted with a clothes pole.  No drag,

no weight, no wind, just quiet, just wrung out

water evaporating in the sun that will,

eventually, she can’t be without

knowing it, right? come up.