Strange Fish

It happens, now and then, that someone
else’s bed is yours to use, to visit
overnight, like the hosts downstairs,
who have sent you climbing off with
folded towels and smiling valediction
but not the first idea of how to do it,
how to throttle hip and cheek and
shoulder at the prospect of these tight
striped sheets, tucked spread, yellow
lamplight on the pillows’ hulls—
your body’s scintillating dread of
all this coiled comfort: another life.

‘‘France,’’ they’d said, and marveled
at their daughter’s independence.
A semester in Marseilles. Great family.
Wine. Strange fish. Good classes, hard—
everything detailed in email and by phone.

Here her absence hangs like muslin
in the room, over wall space and posters,
clock radio and neat book stack
beside the bed, slung across the dresser,
behind the closet door a shroud and now
stirring faintly when you raise the window,
turn out the light and slip between
the cool, slick sheets to wait—wait until
the street light shuddering in the trees,
the whispered susurration of the tires,
a furnace shiver, your own involuntary sigh—
wait until it gathers and pulls away,
like a curtain clutched in someone’s hand
to open up a view at dusk: primrose, moonvine,
shadows ripening to darkness across the lawn.

Copyright 2008 University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.