Neighbor

by John Donohue

There in her backyard in the rain and crazier by the week, my neighbor Joan is laying out the many big blue pieces of her downstairs carpet on the grass, “To clean them,” she calls holding up her Tide and a long-handled brush, “just like the Persians in the villages!”   “They use Tide?” I ask, shocked stupid, this never-dry-out, 5,000 pound, smell-bad disaster pushed aside by an image of the orange box set amid the rocks beside a stream in hills near Hamadan.   And where the hell’d she find the strength of will and just plain strength to rip it up and drag it out? And yes, there’s something I could say to her, something I could do that might help turn her from her hell-bent march to full-blown madness—   but I won’t, I’ll never be her friend: smart, short-fused, aggressive, you give an inch she’s calling, leaving food, barging in and personal; slow it down she’s slamming doors, accusing, writing incoherent letters. And I do not love her—except in theory.   So. I watch her sprinkle Tide, her white, loose underarm shaking with the box. I watch her spread it with the brush. In the lightly falling rain I watch her turning on the hose.

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From A Small Asymmetry, Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2005, by JOHN DONOGHUE.