Judith Sanders
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Dishpan Meditations
Evening and everywhere
at taps and tubs
in streams and machines
people are doing dishes
•
Except the Queen.
What she is missing!
Haughty old stiff--
Surely she’d be nicer
if she had to wash
her own Coronation goblet
or the Crown Prince’s
silver spoon
or the tin bowl
of the condemned man’s
last meal
•
Delicate probes
into the stemware
Muscular planing
of the broiler pan
Too bad there are no
prizes for virtuoso
doing of the dishes
•
When we speared woolly mammoths
we licked the fat from our fingers
When we plucked nuts and berries
we rinsed in the rain
When we went out for cones
we ate all the plates
•
My old aunt’s engagement diamonds
hang loose around my finger
They glint in the gray dishwater
What if they should slip off
and whirl down the drain
with the scraps and suds?
Tumble through the pipes
that spill into the sea?
Plummet through the deeps
until swallowed by a fish?
Lost, lost forever—
like the minutes of my evening?
Which would I rather
magically recover?
•
Surely I was meant for greater things
Not for scraping candle wax
Not for cabbage rinds but kings
Not for dishwater boiling hot
but for wild nights on wings
•
What goes on inside
the dishwasher?
Does an octopus
swish eight brushes?
Does a squadron of goldfish
lick the plates clean?
•
I am going to open the window
and lob each dirty dish
spewing foam and grease
at the neighbor’s
yapping dog
•
Bronx, 1965: Mistress of the dishpan
as Shabbos candles guttered
Bubbe in her hand-stitched apron
recounted her ancient Yiddish tragedies
for my lipsticked mother
who contemplated teethmarks
on her plastic cigarette holder
while I, awkward
in my first panty girdle,
dabbed a dishrag
at the china’s worn rosebuds
Soon Bubbe would be done
with all those years of eating
Soon spiders would crawl
on the dishes, boxed and buried
in my mother’s garage
•
Tonight I say to the dishes,
no thank you
Tonight I am just
going to open the cupboard
and re-stack the smeared plates
•
This dishwater has traveled
all over the world
Maybe it was an icicle
gleaming in the Himalayas
Maybe some swank dolphin,
smart and unencumbered,
surfed its rainbow spray
Maybe it rinsed
a monk’s rice bowl
or a hunter’s bloody knife
or a princess’s eggshell cup
Let it run
jangling its braided silver
over my rubber glove
Let it run
trilling its wanderings
while I lean and listen
tethered to the sink
•
John Henry said to the dishwasher (unh)
“A man ain’t nothin’ but a man” (unh)
He washed and he washed till he broke his poor heart
And he laid down his sponge and he died, Oh Lord,
He laid down his sponge and he died
•
The bride in frothy white
The groom in satin cummerbund
after feeding each other cake
should put on plastic aprons
and wash and dry the plate
•
My dishpan hands
have given their smoothness
to the dishes
•
Take me to a restaurant, my love,
not for the food
but for the saucers and serving bowls
We won’t think about
that windowless back room
the grinding steaming machine
the penned illegals and defectives
with sopping shirt fronts
shouting obscenities
into the roar
Have another sip of wine, dear,
from your sparkling glass
•
How do nomads
do dishes
in the desert?
•
If I leave the dirty dishes on the table
mice will nose out
and dance on the plates
If I leave the dirty dishes on the table
spies will report me
to The New York Times
•
How much satisfaction I take
in neatly loading the dishwasher
Almost as much
as in composing this poem
•
One thing I cherish
about being married
to you:
When I am flattened
you so manfully
tackle the sink
•
Danger in the dishpan!
A shard of wine glass
The threat of blood
•
Someday my fingers
will swell with arthritis
Someday I’ll recall
this graveyard of burnt pots
this junk heap of crusted crockery
and envy my capacity
to engineer renewal
•
They are washin’ in Boston, Pittsburgh PA
Deep in the heart of Texas, down in Frisco Bay…
Shake that towel
Croon to that spoon
•
Who scrubbed hemlock from Socrates’ goblet?
Who rinsed Celia’s kiss from the cup?
Who cleared the Last Supper table?
Who will bleach the tea stains
from my favorite mug?
•
Doorbell. It’s Sisyphus (again)
No need to shoulder a boulder
up some slippery slope--
The infernal eternal curse
reruns right here at my dishpan
Plus in here he can catch
Cassandra nightly on NPR
Hercules, though, won’t show
Claims he’d rather clean
even the Augean
stables, since he only has to
do that once
•
Wash away today
its husks and bones and skins
its crumbs and crusts and rinds
We’ve chewed up all its hours
We’ve sucked out all its flavors
down to the gristle and the grinds
Cleanse the palate and the plate
Down the drain go the dregs
of the day that we just ate
•
As certain as death and taxes,
this daily praxis:
Doing dirty dishes
Bio
Judith Sanders teaches high school English at Shady Side Academy in Pittsburgh, where she lives with her husband and son. She has a B.A. in literature from Yale, an M.A. in writing from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in English from Tufts. She has taught literature and writing at Bowdoin, Tufts, MIT, and Boston University, as well as in France on a Fulbright fellowship. She has also worked as a freelance editor, writer, and writing coach. She has published essays in The American Scholar, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Modern Jewish Studies, and Film Quarterly, and in the anthologies Mama, Ph.D. from Rutgers University Press and From Wollstonecraft to Stoker from McFarland. Her poems have appeared in Poetica, anthologies, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.