The Women Washing Dishes BY JEAN FOLLAIN The women washing dishes were full of talk. You could bear glasses and bowls colliding. Through calm windows you could see a large shed containing several wheels, one from a tricycle, another from a child's stroller pushed so long, so ceremoniously beneath the sycamores. Sometimes the women would stop; still holding porcelain plates in their hands, they'd tilt their heads, squinting a little, trying to remember a forgotten name or date. At their feet, the cat licked milk from a saucer. The future was nonetheless full of hideous landscapes, bloody barracks bitten by the wind, stupor in armored railroad cars. For the time being, it was unheard of. There was the neatness of table settings and shining kitchen utensils touching the softened skin of the dishwashers, these women who, in a couple of hours, would say: "It's getting dark, let's light the lamps, you can't see a thing." -- from A World Rich in Anniversaries Logbridge Rhodes (1981) translated by Mary Feeney and William Matthews French poet Jean Follain's work is full of humble activities and anonymous characters. Although we never get to know them by name, or see them develop through a series of events, the people in the poems are clearly characters in tiny dramas.
As another Follain translator, W. S. Merwin, has noted, the events are not "dramatic" in the conventional sense. Indeed, they're exceedingly ordinary. But they are fraught with the weight of eternity precisely because they are common things, done every day, in all eras. They are, as Merwin says, ceremonial, the rituals of daily life, like washing dishes.
The elegance of this simple "eventless" poem-in-prose is hard to overstate. Though the dishes are in need of washing, empty now, the women are full. Full of talk, and full of good feeling in their chore-mediated communion with one another. Glasses and bowls collide in their small domestic world with the inevitability of the larger collisions of war, the great explosions that will create "hideous landscapes" in the future.
But through the "calm windows" of eternity, we can see the universe as a series of wheels within wheels, as the prophet Ezekiel did, and the motions of the smaller wheels, of the tricycle and the stroller, are no less important than the bigger wheels of the armoured railway cars.
Sometimes the women stop, holding the fragile objects of domesticity in their hands, and try to recall a name or a date. As Follain says in another poem: "A considerable amount of time has piled up. The numbers of certain years no longer evoke anything."
But if the dates of, even the reasons for, a certain war will one day be forgotten, and if the next war is as yet undreamed of, its horrors "unheard of," the cat will continue to lick milk from a saucer at our feet. We will continue to have to perform the simple tasks that maintain our lives, and as we touch the world, its dishes and its cutlery, so the world touches us back, "the neatness of table settings and shining kitchen utensils touching the softened skin of the dishwashers."
We may not speak of the large issues, may not even voice our own hopes or fears, but we sense the weight of our lives, and the lives to which our lives are linked, forward and backward in time, throughout eternity. "It's getting dark, let's light the lamps, you can't see a thing."
This is poetry at its best: its most subtle, its most all-encompassing, its least egocentric. Toronto writer Glen Downie's most recent book of poetry is Wishbone Dance .