—Jack Kornfield, 2001

Window caulk cracking, door padlocked, another laundromat
is closing. How far will people have to drive their dirty
bedspreads? Headlights in daytime, snaking in slow caravans,

black Hefty bags in the backseat, to some suburban strip mall’s
Sit and Spin. My years of hoarding quarters, jam-jar maracas
are over. Wheeling my wet load past oversized peepholes

as I eye the red minutes—over. I don’t have a private
chapel devoted to laundry as seen on HGTV, just
an “in-unit W/D.” And, so must most neighbors. Do I miss

laundromats? Maybe I miss the locker room-like looking,
the furtive interest surely shared given the rule
to never air. Maybe I miss balling socks, folding

underwear, quickly concealing the crotch, on a long table
where so many strangers’ boxers, night gowns have rested.
Any raised surface can be an altar, a place to kneel

side-by-side, mouths open to receive, eyes fixed ahead,
staring into a sleeve. Another laundromat is closing,
and I’m wistful for some imagined leveling, a there-but

for-the-grace gone, forgetting there’s always been drop-off
and laundresses like silent confessors to pound stone, wring
river, inhale the steam of hot metal communing with cotton.

From a stacked dryer in the closet, I carry my tangled
heap to the bed, spilling as I go. Is it lonely? Only
as much as meditation. Fishing and folding, I think:

justice like laundry is never over, which feels profound
until in a bookstore I discover I’m not the first
to find wisdom at the bottom of a hamper. Maybe it’s

not how we do it but that we all do, cycling through
the stink and stain of it. An idea so soft from
billions of washings, you can’t help wanting to wear it.