There's a poem in Ruth Stone's 1991 collection Who is the Widow's Muse? in which the narrator describes the pleasure of washing sheets by hand and drying them outdoors. At the end of the poem, as she folds away the "compact units" of her wash, she "feels the muse may / dwell in the linen closet". In this week's poem, "Things I Say to Myself While Hanging Laundry". Stone again meets her fertile linen muse in a fine extended meditation on ants, the universe and Albert Einstein – as well as bedsheets.
The throwaway title of the poem belies its profundity – and perhaps guarantees it. There is a lightness and briskness about the writing here, as in so much of Stone's work, that evokes a near-audible voice, dryly amused and faintly teasing. The things the poet says to herself are voice-true, simple-sounding, but not simple at all. She travels a quirky route to the cosmic without abandoning the local or becoming portentous. Despite its big imaginative and intellectual reach, there's nothing in the poem that couldn't be quietly said.
The activity of hanging out the washing encloses and enables an extraordinary idea: an ant imagining (or just possibly creating) Albert Einstein. Of course, the poem says the ant is unlikely to be able to dream him up, even in his grosser physical aspects, but the juxtaposition remains central. We accompany the ant as it walks the "clothesline", and see for ourselves the "great fibrous forests" of the now three-dimensional sheets. Although the poem is too subtle to spell it out, the reader may know what parallel is being drawn. The washing line strung between two apple trees is also the world line of "special relativity". Humans, like thinking ants, follow their own "blind pathway across the abyss" (although the poem recognises that the ants may not be blind). And we are all made of the stuff of stars.
Ruth Stone's free verse goes at a measured pace. There are brief lines and expansive ones, stops and starts, changes of direction and carefully placed repetitions: "... the very heart of life ... / The very heart of the universe ..." The poem's overall structure is a ternary one. At line 14, the narrative veers suddenly into an description of the common human pleasure of sleeping in fresh sheets. Then the poet brings us cleverly back to her theme of relativity by turning out the light and reminding us that blindness is necessary for the mind to make its "abstract leap out of this limiting dimension".
A master of register, Ruth Stone chooses a diction that's colloquial, deliciously funny at times ("that maddening relativity") and precise where it needs to be. The scientific vocabulary is slipped into the poem unpretentiously and expands its metaphorical dimension. The human body is "the heavy sac of yourself" and Einstein's algebraic figures resemble, and become, "mandibles". These witty extensions bring the poem to descriptive life while reinforcing the concept of unity between insect and human, the sheet on the washing line and space-time itself.
The poem culminates in an illuminating double exposure: a burrowing, excavating ant-Einstein who seems to originate the big bang, causing sand crystals to explode "into white-hot radiant turbulence" – all the while genially smiling, of course. The final "line from here to there" is the most mysterious of all. There's nothing pat about the conclusion; it suspends the reader between certainties. All we know is that popular science, serious physics, entomology, laundry and poetry have formed a mind-expanding equation – and we are part of it.
Ruth Stone was born in Virginia in 1915 and has lived most of her life in Vermont. Her poems are only now gaining the attention they deserve. She was suggested for poem of the week by smpugh, and I'm grateful to have been led to her work. While it's impossible to convey all her range and power in a single poem, this piece contains at least some of the ingredients that make her such a fresh and delightful writer, as well as an important one.
"Things I Say to Myself While Hanging Laundry" is from the collection Simplicity, published in 1995 by Paris Press. It appears in What Love Comes to: New and Selected Poems, published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books and first published in the USA in 2008 by Copper Canyon Press. Later this year, Paris Press will release a recording of Ruth Stone reading from Simplicity and Ordinary Words. The CD Look to the Future will include this week's poem.
Things I Say to Myself While Hanging Laundry
If an ant, crossing on the clothesline
from apple tree to apple tree,
would think and think,
it probably could not dream up Albert Einstein.
Or even his sloppy moustache;
or the wrinkled skin bags under his eyes
that puffed out years later,
after he dreamed up that maddening relativity.
Even laundry is three-dimensional.
The ants cross its great fibrous forests
from clothespin to clothespin
carrying the very heart of life in their sacs or mandibles,
the very heart of the universe in their formic acid molecules.
And how refreshing the linens are,
lying in the clean sheets at night,
when you seem to be the only one on the mountain,
and your body feels the smooth touch of the bed
like love against your skin;
and the heavy sac of yourself relaxes into its embrace.
When you turn out the light,
you are blind in the dark
as perhaps the ants are blind,
with the same abstract leap out of this limiting dimension.
So that the very curve of light,
as it is pulled in the dimple of space,
is relative to your own blind pathway across the abyss.
And there in the dark is Albert Einstein
with his clever formula that looks like little mandibles
digging tunnels into the earth
and bringing it up, grain by grain,
the crystals of sand exploding
into white-hot radiant turbulence,
smiling at you, his shy bushy smile,
along an imaginary line from here to there.