Discovering Ethel Romig Fuller

There is much that could be said about her, but I am still learning about this former Oregon Poet Laureate. This poem is a delight.

Today – Ethel Romig Fuller

I have spread wet linen

On lavender bushes,

I have swept rose petals

From a garden walk.

I have labeled jars of raspberry jam,

I have baked a sunshine cake;

I have embroidered a yellow duck

On a small blue frock.

I have polished andirons,

Dusted the highboy,

Cut sweet peas for a black bowl,

Wound the tall clock,

Pleated a lace ruffle…

To-day

I have lived a poem.

A New Degas!

Well, new to me, anyway. I had no idea that I'd missed this absolutely gorgeous Degas laundress painting -- thanks to Eavan Boland's poem, I found it. Here's the poem:

Degas's Laundresses

You rise, you dawn

roll-sleeved Aphrodite,

out of a camisol brine,

a linen pit of stiches,

silking the fitten sheets

away from you like waves.

You seam dreams in the folds

of wash from which freshes

the whiff and reach of fields

where it bleached and stiffened.

Your chat's sabbatical:

brides, wedding outfits,

a pleasure of leisured women

are sweated into the folds,

the neat heaps of linen.

Now the drag of the clasp.

Your wrists basket your waist.

You round to the square weight.

Wait. There behind you.

A man. There behind you.

Whatever you do don't turn.

Why is he watching you?

Whatever you do don't turn.

Whatever you do don't turn.

See he takes his ease

staking his easel so,

slowly sharpening charcoal,

closing his eyes just so,

slowly smiling as if

so slowly he is

unbandaging his mind.

Surely a good laundress

would understand its twists,

its white turns,

its blind designs --

it's your winding sheet.