"So I’m doing the laundry today..."

...a poem

Photo Cliff Scholz

So I’m doing the laundry today,
my wife’s bras and undies and socks
naturally always in the mix 
along with my stuff,
her smart and colorful blouses, 
one with a big red embroidered flower on it,
and her form-fitting leggings, 

and I’m thinking about the poem
“For Hettie” written by Amiri Baraka
(formerly LeRoi Jones),
about his wife Hettie, 
and how her left-handedness 
seemed so strange to him. 

“IT’S WEIRD, BABY”

he wrote, all capital letters 
in the middle of the first stanza. 

Now, it's a fine piece of writing, 
that poem. I love it. 
And granted, as poets we're saying 
all kinds of things, never just one,
but personally, 
speaking as another right-handed husband 
of a left-handed wife, 
I think he missed an important point:
I mean, it’s not as if
our spouses have to be left-handed
to be as strange as they are familiar 
to us.

Yep, my wife Mary is also left-handed, 
and we learned early on 
that our complementary hand preferences
allow us to sit side-by-side
while eating dinner, 
no jostling for elbow room 
in a restaurant booth, say,
each with our own fork
safely opposite. 
We can even hold hands between us
while we eat, if we like.

So to me, the right-hand/left-hand difference, 
yeah, it matters, but more important
is noticing how bras and panties
fit a different-shaped body, 
and the deeper complementarity 
this implies, and goodness, 

I haven’t even started to sort  
all the many socks in this pile, 
and they speak truths yet stranger still: 
how I could wear hers and she can wear mine,
and how similar and different our living feet
inside them.