Payback

As a boy I watched my 19th century mother
wash seven sets of sheets every Monday
in the machine with the rhythmic agitator
sounding like drums in elevator music.

The swan-necked drain hose emptied
into the sink where she did the dishes, her
singular, God-decreed obligation after each
crowded meat and potatoes offering.

She would run the sheets through the wringer
into the sink, refill the rinse water onto the
squashed cottons reloaded into the round
tub, standing gratefully still as if watching

the flow of a lovely trout stream. I never
lifted a hand, never thought I should as I saw
her fate as a Mississippian might watch a lynching.
Whitish sheets in that brown house in that sepia

snapshot. My older van, tricked out with a
modern engine does not idle smoothly at a red
light. I must slip the automatic transmission into
neutral. It is I who is in automatic, hardly having

to think as if sitting with my feet in a stream
and leaning my face to the sun between the time
I have picked up the gadget from the hardware and
getting back to the makework that keeps me breathing.