Prose passage from Osip Mandelstam

The Russian Osip Mandelstam, vindictively exiled by Stalin for the second and final time in 1938, died in a Siberian transit camp, reportedly out of his mind. He is known for his poetry, but wrote great, rich, dense, evocative essays and stories about Russian life in St. Petersburg and elsewhere. These two paragraphs (translated by Clarence Brown) are a perfect example. ("Scellé" means sealed. I don't know the "Song of Malbourk," although I have been to the amazing Malbork Castle, in Poland, and it is sometimes spelled "Malbourk.")

From "Riots and Governesses:"

It is my opinion that the little songs, models of penmanship, anthologies, and conjugations had ended by driving all these French and Swiss women themselves into an infantile state. At the center of their worldview, distorted by anthologies, stood the figure of the great emperor Napoleon and the War of 1812; after that came Joan of Arc (one Swiss girl, however, turned out to be a Calvinist), and no matter how often I tried, curious as I was, to learn something from them about France, I learned nothing at all, save that it was beautiful. The French governesses placed great value upon the art of speaking fast and abundantly and the Swiss upon the learning of little songs, among which the chief favorite was the "Song of Malbourk." These poor girls were completely imbued with the cult of great men -- Hugo, Lamartine, Napoleon, and Molière. On Sundays they had permission to go to mass. They were not allowed to have acquaintances.
                Somewhere in the Ile de France: grape barrels, white roads, poplars -- and a winegrower has set out with his daughters to go to their grandmother in Rouen. On his return he is to find everything "scellé," the presses and vats under an official seal. The manager had tried to conceal from the excise tax collectors a few pails of new wine. They had caught him in the act. The family is ruined. Enormous fine. And, as a result, the stern laws of France make me the present of a governess.

Perfect little poem by Henry Taylor

Henry Taylor was a professor in the Lit Department at American University in D.C. when I was a student there in the late Eighties. He was my independent study adviser my senior year. I don't think he was much impressed with me, but was always very kind about it. I love this poem and think of it all the time, partly because it is brief enough for me to remember it, but more because he gets everything right in it (even down to the colon at the end of line 2). I think I recognized this even when I was young, but now, no longer young, I experience the poem in a way I wouldn't have then. It's from his 1985 Pulitzer Prize winning volume, The Flying Change. Here's how he inscribed my copy after an appearance before a great class I took my sophomore year with Robert Bausch called The Living Writers: 

For Jim,
With thanks for good questions and kind words --
All best,
Henry Taylor
25 March 88

The poem: 

Airing Linen

Wash and dry,

sort and fold:

you and I

are growing old.