Ode to the Clothesline

After Alfred Stieglitz Not so much the missing of things but the nostalgia of colors, their music, the ordinary revelation of a family’s life caught in the flop and dance, a jig, if you will, of their layers, outer and inner skins, the secret things so close to the body, the taste, the salt and sweet of blood, and shit, and piss, and then, rinsed and scrubbed, leaving beneath the astringent scent of soap a musky marker of self for strays to smell or imagine as they walk past the parade of the living on taut lines, propped by poles with nails for a hook, above the startling green of grass and hedge, the barefaced concrete steps, the sky, inscrutable as a wall; this is what one carries as a kind of sweetness — the labor of brown hands, elbow-deep in suds, the rituals of cleansing, the humility of a darning or a frayed crotch, the dignity of cleanliness, the democracy of truth, the way we lived our lives in the open.