I Stop Writing the Poem by Tess Gallagher

I Stop Writing the Poem

by Tess Gallagher

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives

or who dies, I’m still a woman.

I’ll always have plenty to do.

I bring the arms of his shirt

together. Nothing can stop

our tenderness. I’ll get back

to the poem. I’ll get back to being

a woman. But for now

there’s a shirt, a giant shirt

in my hands, and somewhere a small girl

standing next to her mother

watching to see how it’s done.

This poem originally appeared in Poetry East, Issue 43, in Fall 1996. It has since appeared in anthologies and two of Gallagher's books.

No matter which study you look at, the statistics are the same: women do far more housework than men. Women who work, women who make more money than their male spouses, women with and without kids, women at all ages . . . women do more. (Check out some stats about this from 2023 here.)

In 1996, when this poem was first published, men did far less housework and much less tending their children, but not so much as to make this poem obsolete.

"No matter who lives/or who dies, I'm still a woman." Whatever is happening in the world and in specific lives, people need to eat, to have clean clothes and linens, to make sure the kids are okay--Gallagher could have said all of this, but her line is much more devastating: I'm still a woman. It's shorthand for "so I must fold the clothes, even if I was working on a poem or someone was born or someone dies."

A man may work from sun to sun

But a woman's work is never done.

This old 17th century saying is expressed in the third line of this poem.

The next few lines add a love poem element, where the speaker assures us that the man whose clothes she is folding shares tenderness with her.

As if assuring herself, the speaker tells us she will get back to her work, writing a poem. And

she will also get back to being a woman, which may seem contradictory here (doesn't being a woman mean housework?). Coming after the lines mentioning a male partner, the being a woman in this context refers to the other expectation of women, that of having no sexual agency of their own. Another old saying expressing what is expected of women:

An angel in the kitchen, a lady in the living room, and a whore in the bedroom.

Since there is only one shirt mentioned in this entire poem, I cannot help but wonder if while Gallagher was writing, her husband asked/commanded her to fold his shirt that he needed right then or the world would end. Her husband, the prose writer Raymond Carver, should have known better than to interrupt a writer at work, but maybe when the dryer's signal went off, he was writing and felt he could not take the time to fold his own shirt. But she could. (I am assuming a lot here--this poem could be entirely made up. But I feel an undercurrent of sarcasm and anger in this poem that makes me imagine scenarios.)

The ending is grim--little girls all over watching their mothers fold clothes, learning not just how to fold, but that it is a woman's job and they will be expected to do this someday.

Gallagher has written 11 books of poetry as well as essays and short stories. Her work also appears in numerous anthologies. She is originally from Washington, has lived all over, and now divides her time between the Pacific Northwest and Ireland.