I sat at the very end of the laundromat,
so old there wasn't even Muzak, no shiny pink washing machines,
the ceiling full of peeling paint like a book with its pages burned.
My eyes felt thick, my sight poured out of me in columns, focused, 
I saw, say "saw" slowly three times and you will feel the odd heft of this 
      vision:
saw, saw, saw,
the way I felt my third night out of prison when we walked through a
      stubble field
to the river I had never seen by daylight and sat there
in the cool October night, the river below us down a steep bank,
sat there watching the blackness for many minutes,
felt the black motion of my own heavy body for the first time in ten
     months
and in that laundromat the blackness came again, everything there
heavy with use, the huge ceiling fan encrusted with dirt, each blade 
       thick with it
and at the other end the short man in the green shirt who ran the place,
one of those puke green knit shirts buttoned to the top
he sorted laundry, slowly, very slowly, taking each piece out of the dryers,
shaking it once, holding it to the light, shaking it again,
then (if it were coat or shirt) lifting it to his nose
and smelling the armpits, smelling each one carefully
and finally hanging them in a long row ready for pickup.

It was late, almost 10 P.M., and he called out to another laundromat.
At first he seemed happy, then angry as he complained bitterly,
how they hadn't cleaned the machines,
how he would shake them up good soon, how they listened to the
       radio—
no more radios!—it was quarter to ten and they still had time to do the
       windows.
My whole body then was with his body, I felt the rising anger in us both,
heavy, weighted, each in our clumsy bodies. I could feel
the pull of him, as if dragging me across the dance floor,
teaching me a new step, no
future, no future, our hands sunk to the elbows in soap,
twisting shirts into rags, sinking the rags one by one,
cleaning the dry grains of soap off the table tops for the last time,
removing the thumb prints from the plate glass,
pulling back the tab on the cash register, making the room black.