My Blankey Died: In Memory

It died— sad tragedy—awful moment—
tragic, utter malaise; shards, strips,
strands of my first lover, reduced
in the cotton-sturdy cycles
of too-tough washing machine love.

Beaten harder than rugs hanging on clotheslines,
sending not dust into the air, but precious scent
into the water and off into the miles of pipe to anywhere.
The kind of smell that can only come from years of the feel
of days of handling of hands of the sweet stink of hair
and the sweat of a little boy; a smell that could and often did
send me into a still and enthralling rapture
that I found and felt and smelled within the
soft cotton chamois and me-smell.

But the bright burning fire of detergent
removed the yellowish egg-white color,
and seeing the drained bleached mess I fished out
from the rolling oven— I knew it had died.

Soon after, I thought how pivotal
a question as simple as,
“do you want me to wash that honey?”
could be, and how irrevocable
certain decisions, directions, even
circumstances were, are, and will be.

I also learned—a little later,
that when your heart gets broken
and the pain is too much,
when you look and can only see
the moment in hind-sight
where you could have steered course
and avoided the pain that is too much—
moments become memories.