Bath Towels in Marble, by Sue Ellen Thompson

Yours, Mine, Ours, sculpture by Sebastian Martorana (USA) 2012. Image © Smithsonian American Art Museum. Used with artist permission. Click on image for artist website.

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​Bath Towels in Marble
 
On ordinary chrome towel racks— 
much like those on which I hang 
my damp, frayed own—they look thick 
and what the ads would call 
luxurious. I tilt my head against the wall,
but nothing can convince me 
that they’re not Egyptian cotton.
One looks as if it’s just been flung 
there—bunched, off-centre, 
casually draped—while the other 
 
is folded, Montessori-like, in thirds 
and hung so that the cross hems 
meet and cast a prudent shadow.
The yin and yang of domestic life
fashioned so convincingly
it makes you want to grab one, 
flinging it behind your back and pulling 
first one way and then the other, 
as if to smooth the pebbled skin raised
by stepping from the shower. My husband tosses 
 
his in the general direction of the towel bar, 
from which it looks as if it’s trying 
to escape. But in this work 
I also see the man I didn’t marry,
whose shirts and trousers were arrayed 
with military care and grace, whose hair 
lay tame in graven waves, and whose features 
I might once have called—before I’d seen 
the skill involved in freeing what is human 
from Carrera marble—chiseled.
 
Sue Ellen Thompson
 
Sue Ellen Thompson’s most recent book, Sea Nettles: New & Selected Poems appeared in 2022 from Grayson Books. She is also the editor of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1st ed.). She lives on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay and teaches at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD. In 2010, she received the prestigious Maryland Author Award from the Maryland Library Association, which is given to a poet once every four years for his/her body of work.