IN GENETIC MEMORY OF STONE
1. I read in the paper that men prefer blue and green
while women tend toward reds and yellows.
A man dressed in red empties his wash cart into the dryer.
Every item of clothing is red or in variations of red.
An occasional pink sock lightens the load.
He sits beside his woman who's also dressed in red.
Part of some religious sect dressing in red instead of orange?
A Mexican worker converses in hushed tones with his comrade
and his eyes are on every woman here.
His red skin glistens from the heat of the dryers.
Hola. Que tal? Como estas? but one can't address
a stranger in the familiar tense—only the putas, the whores do.
They eye the forbidden breasts of American women.
What is the attraction for pale sallow flesh
while dark wives sing niños to sleep in southern villages?
Young women with blank faces and bored boyfriends
attend the machines in some mysterious rite of passage.
They watch older women who ignore screaming children.
A child with a shaven head stares at the entrance
and the couple dressed in red return.
He wears red shoelaces on his red sneakers.
The Mexican watches women fold laundry to their breasts.
Is he thinking of darker-skinned women beating laundry
on the rocks of the stream near the village?
Or is that also just a myth fallen by the wayside
with overcrowded barrios and polluted streams?
The baby dressed in red reads the pink section
1. I read in the paper that men prefer blue and green
while women tend toward reds and yellows.
A man dressed in red empties his wash cart into the dryer.
Every item of clothing is red or in variations of red.
An occasional pink sock lightens the load.
He sits beside his woman who's also dressed in red.
Part of some religious sect dressing in red instead of orange?
A Mexican worker converses in hushed tones with his comrade
and his eyes are on every woman here.
His red skin glistens from the heat of the dryers.
Hola. Que tal? Como estas? but one can't address
a stranger in the familiar tense—only the putas, the whores do.
They eye the forbidden breasts of American women.
What is the attraction for pale sallow flesh
while dark wives sing niños to sleep in southern villages?
Young women with blank faces and bored boyfriends
attend the machines in some mysterious rite of passage.
They watch older women who ignore screaming children.
A child with a shaven head stares at the entrance
and the couple dressed in red return.
He wears red shoelaces on his red sneakers.
The Mexican watches women fold laundry to their breasts.
Is he thinking of darker-skinned women beating laundry
on the rocks of the stream near the village?
Or is that also just a myth fallen by the wayside
with overcrowded barrios and polluted streams?
The baby dressed in red reads the pink section
of the Chronicle upside down.
What is this fatal attraction to red?
Will he grow up hating the color of passion and life?
The Mexican waits for my dryer.
There are other vacant dryers near the maze of women
folding clothes on the table. But he waits for mine.
He places his meager load in the dryer—
a beige nylon jacket, polyester shirt and pants.
A friend told me, that in his country, Peru, the natives
dress in their polyester Sunday best
and climb the slopes of Macchu Picchu
expiring from the heat.
I fold ragged hand towels, my eyes
catching the furtive glance of the Mexican man.
His sad rabbit eyes drop floorward. No eye contact is made.
My maiden aunt told me she used to wash
the same clean pair of boxer shorts
over and over again so the men in the laundromat
wouldn't know she was single. What was she expecting?
Will he grow up hating the color of passion and life?
The Mexican waits for my dryer.
There are other vacant dryers near the maze of women
folding clothes on the table. But he waits for mine.
He places his meager load in the dryer—
a beige nylon jacket, polyester shirt and pants.
A friend told me, that in his country, Peru, the natives
dress in their polyester Sunday best
and climb the slopes of Macchu Picchu
expiring from the heat.
I fold ragged hand towels, my eyes
catching the furtive glance of the Mexican man.
His sad rabbit eyes drop floorward. No eye contact is made.
My maiden aunt told me she used to wash
the same clean pair of boxer shorts
over and over again so the men in the laundromat
wouldn't know she was single. What was she expecting?
2. A student of mine, Sally Luna, a slight, beautiful child
with black hair cascading to her waist wrote:
"I love the trees. They have feelings locked inside them
and they are brown like me. They understand."
She washes the hair from her leaves
and refuses to write poems in her own tongue.
No tears to turn into leaves and land on this earth.
Whole forests have been decimated on this earth.
They said there once was a time squirrels
could cross the entire country
leaping from branch to branch,
never once touching the ground.
Sally Luna's hair is a waterfall where wild birds nest.
To what oracles will the trees
listen to after her leaves fall?
We close our eyes to memory, Poland. Ireland.
Sandinistas of the world watching
someone go down.
The real struggle is in trying to forget
what you know to be true
but the skin holds memory.
They say every atom ever created
is still around after three billion years
of constant recycling.
On this earth, we are part tree, part dinosaur,
part rock, star, sky and air
the genetic memory of stone.
Memory continues unbroken.
They say red is the color of passion
and blue the color of tranquility,
but this beige, the pale earth tones
the brown polyester of the Mexican's work clothes
are the color of cultivated earth.
The oppressor and the oppressed.
They say their women pass the time
pressing strawberries between their thighs.
One can tell much about a stranger in a laundromat.
In the laundromat, we're all a little seedy,
hiding secrets from each other's prying eyes
because our worn clothing divulges too many truths
and the dryers whisper secrets to each other.
In this uncomfortable village
we're all eyeing each other up and down.
The mountain streams are gone.
There are no women washing clothing by hand
and sharing each other's dreams and sorrows in the sunlight.
No, we are not touched by those brown people
pruning vines in prize vineyards.
They drift in from across the border
and from the riverbanks they watch us swim
laughing silently at our pale nakedness.
They are shadowless in the bright sunlight.
Only in here, the laundromat,
do their shadows become faintly visible.
summer 1982
Well, part 2 made it to the digital age, but not part 1, which I added 10/16. Peculiar. (See below.) Less than ten poems from 1982 even made it to an electronic file.
OCR'd part 1! YES!
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