Clothesline in Summer
by Michael P. Aleman — The Friday Poem on 24/05/2024
We’ve all seen those old black and white photographs — lines of washing strung between houses in any American city. Michael P. Aleman contrasts the monochrome grime with his mother’s rich and colourful dreams of Persian silks, striped shawls and gold veils, which highlights the inevitable gap between fantasy and reality. His tone is knowing, pragmatic, and slightly amused, but ultimately kind. The poem resists sentimentality, but still moves us. That’s quite a triumph.
Clothesline in Summer
In Chicago during the 1950s
my mother’s clothesline was a study in white
(or grayish white, to be accurate)
and she always hung her underwear
on the inside line, hidden by sheets and towels
so the neighborhood boys couldn’t see it.
In Persia on washing day, she said, all the lines
were filled with silk, multi-colored garments
and though she never owned a silk garment in her life,
one day she would own striped shawls
and seven gold veils like the ones Salome danced in
and maybe a scarf like Isadora Duncan
though never one that long.
She was specially fond of a pink blouse
her mother gave her for Christmas one year
but my father made fun of it.
Fairies and queers wear pink, he said
so she only used it when afternoon shopping,
where it drew compliments from clerks —
especially Dutch, the neighborhood butcher
who said with a wink, A pretty, pink blouse
for a pretty, pink woman. She dreamed
in Technicolor, dreams of clotheslines
decorated with thin, gossamer hangings
fluttering in the breeze. But the truth was
the wind kicked up dust in her gray life
and made grayish clothes grayer.
Michael P. Aleman was an inner-city Chicago kid playing on rooftops and in the alleys and streets, and as a teenager he wandered the hills around Powder River, Wyoming. He spent three years as a U.S. Navy Radioman using Morse Code. After a most honorable discharge, he taught English for thirty years. He says, “I had a wonderful bride of my youth who died after fifty-one years of marriage, and now have a bride of my age, just as wonderful. Life and God are good.”
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