The Millennial Pedestrian

When I first moved to New York City I sublet a floor-through walkup apartment — an old tenement brownstone. In the morning when I awoke I could see through my back window the laundry floating between the other buildings up and down the block, and occasionally I’d see women in housedresses reeling in the day’s catch of sheets, pillowcases, underdrawers and undershirts. The sight never moved me to poetry, but then I was probably late for work.

Thankfully, Richard Wilbur has seen the laundry from his window and turned it into this, one of his very best, and best-loved, poems. 

 

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
    By Richard Wilbur

   The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
            Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

   Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing.

   Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
                        The soul shrinks

   From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
           “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

   Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

   “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
             Keeping their difficult balance.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007.
It's part of the Prose category.
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