The Chambermaids in the Marriott in Midmorning by Maxine Kumin are having a sort of coffee klatch as they clean calling across the corridors in their rich contraltos while luffing fresh sheets in the flickering gloom of the turgid passionate soaps they follow from room to room. In Atlanta they are black, young, with eloquent eyes. In Toledo white, middle-aged, wearing nurses shoes. In El Paso always in motion diminutive Chicanas gesture and lift and trill in liquid Spanish. Behind my Do Not Disturb sign I go wherever they go sorely tried by their menfolk, their husbands, lovers or sons who have jobs or have lost them, who drink and run around, who total their cars and are maimed, or lie idle in traction. The funerals, weddings and births, the quarrels, the fatal gunshots happen again and again, inventively reenacted except that the story is framed by ads and coming attractions, except that what takes a week in real life took only minutes. I think how static my life is with its careful speeches and classes and how I admire the women who daily clean up my messes, who are never done scrubbing with Rabelaisian vigor through the Marriotts morning soaps up and down every corridor. The Chambermaids in the Marriott in Midmorning by Maxine Kumin, from Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010. © W.W. Norton and Company, 2011. [from The Writers Almanac]
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 11:50:47 +0000
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