Watching the Mayan Women
I Think of My Mother 

TI know words like wringer and washboard,
understand laundry, learned how rainwater

is best for hair and to soak clothes covered in mud
from grassless yards.  My mother collected it in tubs

outside the kitchen door, added a little lemon juice.
After scrubbing I helped her push shirts, pants

through the wringer moving to the washer’s swish.
I understand women who’ve mastered

the science of keeping children clean.
The Mayan women add white ash to rainwater

collected in the stone pilas.  The children I meet
on the dirt path in San Antonio Aguas Calientes—

their clothes shine rain-clean.
Mud outside our door, tracked on the floor,

my mother’s days ran out with labor.
So much love in this long history of work.

Eclipse 

The shorn field
expose their ribs
while the living
turn to their hearths
and the moon
red, in a ring of ice
reappears at the windows
wavering, forgotten,
like all things
too small or too great .

With eiderdowns folded
the long married
and the celibate dream
in a sleep blanched
of passion’s fullness
or desperation’s emptiness
while the moon
in its plenitude
pardons them.

Women Who Love Judi Dench


This is the city morning, quietly exhaling
its damp; a light rain shutters the streets

into intimacy.  Somewhere in this city
there is fragrance of fruit, of cool china

on a glass table.  And the muted voices
of five women seated there in the natural

calm of meeting; they must attend
to one another, there is so much unknown

ungiven that can be given: Walks to take
through the small markets and exhibits

speaking of the drama and Judi Dench who
brought them to London, led by the reds

of the fauves to a gallery filled with Aztec gold
where they drink coffee colored by

complicity; while rain cools Wren’s stone,
women’s words rise into the morning, warming it.

Poems from Love in the End (Bright Hill Press, 2008)


 

© 2009 Mary Kay Rummel