Hotel Housekeeping: Summer Seasonal, 1969
Maryann Corbett

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Falls Church, Virginia

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To remember it now, that season,
is to conjure the stink and fug of the smokers’ section,
the carpets, op art in turquoise,

and a fog of faces, nameless—
except for Anna’s. Sybil-priestess of cleaning,
she looms, the summer’s icon,

endlessly aiming her side-eye
at me, the silly suburban teenage temp-girl
who grasped cleaning as theory

and not as strong-willed struggle
begun each day on lumbering, steamy buses
from the scarred heart of the District.

Patient instructress in mantras
of muscled arms and the scoured shine of porcelain,
she swung with the skirl of the vacuum

chanting her admonitions,
then eased her dentures in with a practiced grimace
at lunch, to eat a sandwich.

We watched the soaps together
those noontimes, lounging on beds in vacant doubles,
rapt till the closing credits,

as though, for those half-hours,
lapped in those stories, we had a dream in common.
Days of Our Lives was a favorite,

and mine began in August,
flown off to college in soul-whoopeeing freedom.
Did I trouble to say goodbye?

That, like so many youthful thorns in my conscience,
I allow myself to forget.

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Maryann’s notes: “For me, the most generative aspect of formal poetry is meter; once I get a rhythm in my head, it’s like turning on a spigot. While I—like most of us—write a lot of iambic pentameter, I’m very fond of noniambic meters, especially classical meters like sapphics and hexameters. In this poem, I’ve swiped the metrical pattern of Richard Wilbur’s ’The Writer,’ not for the first time. As for the subject matter, the story here is about as close to autobiography as I get. The poem was published in The MacGuffin in 2021.”​

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Maryann Corbett is the author of six books of poetry. Her work has won the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and her poems, translations, and reviews are published in many journals and included in anthologies like Best American Poetry; Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters; and Contemporary Catholic Poetry. A seventh collection is forthcoming from Slant Books.​​​​​

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