In the morning, we do
laundry, grab up piles
of clothes into heaps, into
the water, the soap suds
Once you had told me how
the block you lived on in college
used to always smell of cheap
detergent, like SweetTarts and
the soap your grandmother used
Scent brings us back so easily
the smell of catalpa on a street
in San Antonio twists me to a child
hood under heart-shaped leaves
Now we use scent-free detergent,
pull in only the smell of clean,
fresh from the dryer, the heat
against our hands
You tell me about the memory
of slime molds, as we fold
clothes, how scientists have
used the way the mold spreads
to predict the shape of galaxies
This is our cosmic web
how the planets and stars and
life spiral out,
how we long to trace it
those distances between
shown to us through
a mold inching across
a simulation of space
The mold memorizes where
food might be, like we memorize
the shape of everyone
we think we might belong to
the space between us, collapsing
a sheet we folded
pressed close together
just to spread out later
pull across the bed
the distance suddenly
there again
