Poems in Bed
…the darkness around us is deep.
—William Stafford
Winter’s close—light’s low and brief.
The body’s slow heft slumps
in the early dark toward sleep.
I resist, propped up steep
on a barricade of pillows, reading
poems. It’s a solo siege.
Big blinks to keep awake—
to drift unconscious is to cease.
To close the eyes, to not exist.
Dark equals cold in this
geography of loneliness.
It’s true enough across the earth.
Time for the anthology of rhyme.
I mutter to the rhythm of a dead man’s
breath—someone alive here whispers
Let’s try something else. I think
I’ll pick up my notebook and pen
from the floor by the bed where they fell
before I slipped deep last night
despite the lamp—I’ll write
some thoughtless lines. All I’ve got
in mind is the distance of the sun,
how its zenith heat’s forgotten
and the woman who slept here is gone
south where it’s warm. I’ll write that.
She’d hold her hands to a candle
in a restaurant. It’s closer to dawn.
Jed Myers lives in Seattle, Washington. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, qarrtsiluni, Atlanta Review, Quiddity, Palooka, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Rose Alley Press anthology Many Trails to the Summit, and elsewhere.