Folding DressesAuthor(s): John ColemanSource: College English, Vol. 54, No. 8 (Dec., 1992), p. 939Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/378448 .

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POEMS 939

FOLDING DRESSES

Our bodies echo in the hollow living room as we fold decades of cotton dresses Aunt Mart left behind. Our own clothes whisper, knees and swallows crack, soft groans fall as we bend.

Mart starved herself. Her act is with us

among the bags of dresses, the table of earrings, necklaces, eye glasses, pale watches, rings, the rack of black and gray

coats with mink collars. We handle these things gently, as if Mart's white shoulders still bloom

through this sleeveless violet, as if her neck, mottled with years, holds this frail string of pearls.

Mart starved herself. All the sounds we make, kisses our lips sometimes make on their own, bits of songs we hum, are words we'd like to say. Each fold is a glance toward heaven, a mute's good bye.

John Coleman

GLASS

Out the office windows, sidewalk cherries

beginning to be ornamental, the afternoon

winding down, and the phone rings: Charles

Neville, a stranger who says he remembers my father when he was nine, a boy, if I can only imagine that.

They played, he says, played in a peach orchard with an old house smack in the middle of it-

long lines of trunks with heavy canopies then a saggy porch fronting grimed, wavy windows: two casements flanking the nailed door, one on the west wall and two on the east. Late afternoon, he says-one day they broke every window, stoned them all for the pure thrill of breaking something fragile, for the sound it made again and again, the sound

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