Verse
Schwartz, Hillel & Cooperman, Robert
Robert Cooperman The Empress of the Laundromat To beat her is impossible: with her three teeth, white hair, and mushroom nose; her skin like the hulls of ships that have collected...
...Or I'll mention a certain sloppy someone better at this sort of thing than J am, and available Sundays, and soft-hearted as special four-for-one bathtub soap...
...357...
...Or — but she has come a-knocking already and I'm in a tizzy, scrubbing the floors, oiling the antiques...
...I slice open worse predicaments over my breakfast toast...
...from its dryer and replaces it with her rags and ribbons, the skirts and blouses she has worn all her adult life, and longer...
...You'll see, I will tell her, how little outlandish, how infinitely unadvisable your life has been...
...If 1 wait one more instant I'm afraid she will wink at me and turn the pages right-side-up...
...Like the cuckoo she is irresistible and like the tamer birds, I give way...
...Who do you think you are to be entitled to an answer...
...Smiling and half crazy she dumps my laundry, less than half dry...
...When I shout at her waving my arms like Napoleon, or Marc Antony before Actium, she smiles, cocks her head and allows me to restore my sheets and shorts my towels and tee-shirts into the heal to hatch clean...
...Listen, Ann, I too want out of this business of wisdom...
...She knocks hard like a deaf woman with a walnut cane and I must see who's there, knock knock, who's there...
...I watch her take my seat, open my paper and scan the tabloid — upside-down, the news more strange than usual...
...Or I will say, all women are not Brothers or doctors...
...She smiles, waves me good-bye, even opens the door for me...
...But as soon as my back is turned she is at it again, dragging my rightful darlings out replacing them with her changelings...
...Or, again, perhaps 1 will take her to bed like a new pair of pajamas from Penney's and sleep warm and cheaply inside her and wake with most everything sta-prest and crisply ignorant of nightsoil...
...Ann who...
...her skin like the hulls of ships that have collected barnacles for centuries at the bottom of forgotten oceans...
...She accepts my defeat with grace...
...Hillel Schwartz Fantasiestucke 3. Ann Landers Comes to Me for Advice Not to worry, I will say, candling her confession, like a stale egg, Ann, dear, you are but one of hundreds upon hundreds upside-down in a pound cake, sweet, rich, and confused...
...life goes on without professions of faith or fable...
Vol. 114 • June 1987 • No. 11
