When I was a young girl I found a poetry book that looking back, I’m sure I was much too young to understand. But from the book, I took away an impression of a woman who wrote about everyday things, like folding clothes and washing dishes, and for her, love was in these simple tasks. The one I remember the most was “I Stop Writing the Poem,” (Tess Gallagher).
I thought of her poetry when I heard an interview on NPR with Middlesex author Jeffery Eugenides. He recently edited My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekov to Munro. He was asked if he was a romantic. I enjoyed his reply.
“I’m a father and a husband, and I find that as life goes on, the kind of youthful romanticism changes into a deeper kind of, familial romanticism that is not really something so often written about in these kinds of stories,” he says.
Now in my first year of marriage, it is this type of love that inspires me, this type of love that I hold sacred. I decided a long, long time ago that if I were to ever write a collection of poetry it would be an ode to laundry-folding, dish-washing, everyday love.
My empty
chocolate milk glasses
lie scattered around the house.
Exquisite shrines
to a childhood necessity.
My husband picks them up -
one by one
and they are taken
unceremoniously
to be washed.
I have always loved your poetry especially the ones about the everyday things, like the one about the frog you found on the way to the mail box.