You and I have shared many beds:
from freshman days in borrowed rooms
when you would crawl into my queen
or I in yours, and we’d watch movies
that surely nobody was meant to see
and laugh as thunder lashed the roof,
to senior year, our twins pushed close
to let thoughts spill across our pillowcases
more easily than were we on our own.
Laughter is a context we inhabit—
or used to, anyways.
The last year saw us trawl less often
down the same waterways, passing
in the hall on route to separate rooms.
I think we joked, still.
If we didn’t, it was probably my fault:
I have a habit of wearing out my loves
and burying them behind me in the dirt.
What did you think when you got the call?
I was too blood-fogged to hear the words
the woman spoke above me in the ditch.
Did you picture me as you drove, see glass
shattered over the seat, the airbags loose like sails?
They left me in a chair alone:
head bowed, jeans soaked with mud
and rain, and cold against the leather.
When the door opened and I heard your soft
“Oh, honey—”
Well, I heard it. There’s too much more to say.
You helped unlace my boots so I could step
out of my wet jeans, exchanging them
for thin and scratchy sweats of hospital blue.
“Feels like I’m wearing Swiffer cloths,” I told you,
as you took my arm and lead me to a chair.
I leaned my head against the wall
and laid my hand in yours, arm bent
so that the IV wouldn’t pinch.
You narrated the movie on TV—
some Nick Cage slasher film
that surely nobody was meant to see—
then read me poetry from your phone
while we joked about my taste in men:
musicians, poets, the tortured artist type.
Your sweatshirt smelled like you;
you’d lent it me to keep me warm,
a robe of fleece and sea-foam green.
It smelled like you, a comfort and relief
when all other smell and taste was blood.
I think I made a joke about the cloth
that wrapped my head, like some soldier
from a soap opera. It’s strange,
that then I could've joked at all.
And yet, the pattern seems to be:
loneliness makes grave our misery,
but love brings laughter from the tomb.