Jessica Greenbaum
Time and the Clothes Line
The vine that grows anywhere
a drop of sun will water it,
the line reeled out and back
from high windows,
or plucked at from the ground for the dried fruit
of its labor, you are
the connecting cord of all
our habitats, and I can see you from the cable car above
Mexico City, across apartment patios
or when a plane flies low
over subdivisions (which
you might divide again),
or from the road outside Canaan
where a side yard flickers
with your pennants. My mother
loved you and defied
neighborhood ordinances
for your gift of fresh air,
her dexterity with the simple
machine of clothespins
like a senator reaching for his pen.
I see her carrying the heavy
basket of wet clothes
through the back door of the garage
to that corner of our Long Island yard
chorused by lilacs—
and later, as other mothers knew
when cakes were done,
having unpinned them
with the efficiency of a
seamstress undoing a hem
(there in a space her own mother,
nearly clipped to
the apartment’s kitchen, didn’t have)
then my mother coming back in
with the dried clothes folded, the
basket lighter, the lilacs
with no one to sing with,
and that was long ago, just now the sky going
dark, the first drops falling.