The Everyday Housewife

[billy]

She watches clothes dry
through plate glass,
adjusting her physical being--
legs open and arms folded,
gives in to discursive thought. this conflicts too much with
So perceptive this watcher
of scramble, but without care
to know formal tensions
going on inside the dryer.
Suffused with powerful
feeling tones, she becomes
absorbed in tumbling whites-- this
socks, t-shirts, panties, towels,
dish cloths and table cloths,
fixed, to an extreme verge
of bicameral consciousness.[b]Both the above conflict with this statement[/b]
At such basement moments
water pipes, hot water heater,
junk in boxes fade. The lawn chair
she sits on, little tactile substance.
Yes, even the Maytag dryer
itself exists only to the extent
a listless, circling panorama
therein housed.
Her world is radically
foreshortened to immediate
experience of garments dancing,
dancing, circling, tumbling--
but not joyously rising and falling,
never singing, but ending
in a pointless crumbling heap;
all spontaneous life,
all wetness gone to dry.
Today she went again
to the basement to watch
clothes dry, but there was nothing
inside the dryer.
She sat there
looking at her toes.

for me the woman i see here is an extraordinary housewife. the title doesn't fit the theme of the poem (for me) here we have a housewife who spends many hours a day watching the dryer or her toes. my mind says there's something deeper going on but my eyes tell it to stfu
while i like the poem, i found it to be a collection of thoughts pertaining to the writers pov of the titled subject. i read the posts about lies; for me if a poet lies it has to be a good lie. one that can't be detected as such.
in this instance, one that makes me the reader have some kind of affinity with the subject. (here it doesn't succeed)
i thought there were too much of conflict between certain statements for it to make credible sense and it was mainly these that stopped the poem being something more. all that said, i don't think it was a bad poem, it just felt like a bad lie. (jmo)

thanks for the read as always