5/24/05 (mostly worthless)

Snow turned to drizzle last night,
The form the precipitation might take uncertain—
Wet snow, very cold rain adhering to the undergarments,
Rain that penetrates the tightest weave of fabric,
Insinuates itself among synthetic fibers even,
impossible to remove without evaporation
or hanging the wash on a line in the showers’ aftermath.
Rain that clings to a network of stitches
Alternating with another color at a level either
Microscopic or invisible to the healthy human eye:
And I beg you, don’t go there. Let the selvedge unravel
From the rain and the expansion and stretch that it causes,
Throw away the old clothes when they refuse to fit—
Who's going to need to know your laundry list?

In that time of yore when they didn’t know how to wash in cold water,
That time bereft of top-load agitators, high-speed spin cycles
And automatic release cartridges for fabric softeners—

Before perfumes could be dispersed in the cloudy waters of the rinse cycle,
Before the miracle of lemon-scented bleach, or the later brands
With the scent of Tyrolean valleys contained inside them,
When you could almost smell the mountaineer’s horn and blue-bells
He probably crushed beneath his laced-up mountain jack-boots!
Then you taste the aftertaste of muesli lingering on his mountaineering lips—
In you suck his chilly mountain breath as does the bee.

Or before the old crones
slapped the tunic the freedman carelessly tossed
Against a rock near the riverside,
The chief principle tributary down which lived
The hereditary enemy or pariah clan,
Before wreaths or skins of predatory animals
Were wrapped around the reproductive organs
Not perhaps from shame so much as a wish to decorate.
There was the same precipitation, not snow not sleet,
That soaked the ferns or funneled into streams
Or spent itself as it saturated spongy mother earth
Which was lightly packed, mealy, which was ready
For rain to stretch its talons across every grain
Or ferropyrite crystal or lifted broken, once shiny piece
Or magnolia leaf that would grace some garden party
Yet unseen. Meanwhile, from ether itself, a ball of ether shuddered.