What mothers say

when they are greeted grumpily in the morning by their children, told that there's nothing to eat or I hate that kind of cereal or I don't have any clean underwear and how come our laundry isn't done?, what mothers say is do you understand what it's like to have to ask someone to do something all day, every day? What if you had to ask me to do your laundry or make your breakfast or buy you new clothes or pay for your sports equipment like I have to ask you to pick up your towels, feed the dog, brush your teeth, empty your lunchbox, take out the garbage, pick up that piece of paper on the floor that you've just stepped over.


Harrumph.

There's always poetry, though, women in peignoirs, the complacency of peignoirs (thank you Wallace Stevens), etc.:

Angry Women

Women in peignoirs are floating around

the landscape well out of eyesight

let alone reach. They are as palpable

as the ghost of my dog Rose whom I see

on long walks, especially when exhausted

and my half-blind eyes are blurred by cold wind

or sleet or snow. The women we've mistreated

never forgive us nor should they, thus their ghostly

energies thrive at dawn and twilight in this vast

country where any of the mind's movies can be played

against this rumpled wide-screened landscape.

Our souls are travelers. You can tell when your own

is gone, and then these bleak, improbable

visits from others, their dry tears because you were

never what you weren't, so that the world

becomes only what it is, the unforgiving flow

of an unfathomable river. Still they wanted you otherwise,
closer to their dreamchild, just as you imagined
fair maidens tight to you as decals to guide
you toward certainties. The new pup, uncrippled by ideals,
leaps against the fence, leaps at the mountains beyond.

         -- Jim Harrison