Home page Date index
Index of titles Index of first lines
Index of forms PDF version of this poem
Concordance Random poem
Slanting Lines
The Bendix washing machine was already elderly
when my mother, acquiring a newer model, donated
the reject to us for our new home. Or was it
not until seven years later, the year that her first
grandchild arrived? I can’t quite recall. Nor can I now
picture it clearly. So why does it come to my mind?
A couple of reasons. One, that it had to be bolted
down to the floor, to prevent it going walkabout,
a perambulation whenever it got to the spin
part of its washing cycle. The other, the noise
that it made as it spun, a rhythmic staccato juddering
with a touch of syncopation.