MY NOTE ON BRUCE SMITH’S POEM LAUNDRY

 Laundry 

Bruce Smith

Not even the cops who can do anything could do this—

work on Sunday picking up dirty and delivering clean

laundry in Philadelphia. Rambling with my father, get this,

in a truck that wasn’t even our own,

part ambulance, part bullet, there wasn’t anything

we couldn’t do. Sheets of stigmata, macula of love,

vomit and shit and the stains of pissing

another week’s salary away, we picked up and drove

to the stick men in shirt sleeves, the thin

Bolshevik Jews who laughed out the sheets like the empty

speech in cartoons. They smelled better than sin,

better than decadent capitalism. And oh, we

could deliver, couldn’t we, the lawless bags through the city

that said in his yawn, get money, get money, get money.

Me:

Does the poem pit the workings of the imagination in transcending what might seem objectively demeaning? 

So father and son, the son imagines, are doing things even the omnipotent cops can’t do, which is picking up dirty laundry and delivering clean laundry, which action becomes an “objective correlative” for that very act of imaginative surpassing. 

The borrowed truck takes on surpassing value. Rather than feeling poorly about not owning a truck, borrowing one takes on valuable heights. It becomes imaginatively part bullet, part ambulance, feeding a feeling of superhuman strength. 

And so grittiness, given by what all gets into the sheets, more consonant with a life of routine drudgery, pissing away yet another week’s salary, gets transformed at least by those who have to clean them, the Bolsheviks’ ideology matching or complementing the son’s imaginative transformation. 

But what perhaps we finally get is the tension between on one hand the imagining and the ideological surpassing and on the other the city that doesn’t care, its response a yawn, its repetition of get money, get money, suggesting that for all the imagining and ideological yearning, dehumanizing reality trumps in the end.

And:

Might laughing out the sheets refer to some action of shaking them to begin cleaning them but with laughing supplanting the shaking; and might the laughter be at what all they’re shaking out? But sour, desperate reality trumps in the end: “…like the empty speech in cartoons.”