You left without notice,
much notice,
I asked the day you left how long:
a week,
not long,
but the longest we've gone
without talking at all.
Within six days I bought a blue sleeping bag:
warm to the touch on the rack,
the last one of its kind, on sale,
I looked at others but this one sang to me of
brilliant acres of stars, campfire smoke noises,
black still water surrounding.
I bought it like an expert, not like a veteran of years of
borrowed bedding
including one scavenged bedroll stolen from me at baggage claim
which I still mourn.
What's the weight will it fit in a stuff sack
I asked instead of saying that it was a wonderful shade of blue.
At home, at bedtime, I unrolled my new friend on the floor, and
immediately feared staining the light grey cotton lining.
A menace to light colors, it took me weeks to get up the nerve
to wear white pants my mother gave me.
I feared staining it with troubled thoughts,
this unviolated place of comfort,
big enough for only one, a little bigger than me,
a place of independent sleep journeys in far-off silent places.
I feared staining it with tears,
before me the spectre of the lonely journey
with nothing of you except polished memories.
I tightened the mummy hood and draft guard
like an astronaut going into an airlock,
protected from anything not myself.
I let the night chores to be done
recede with the unanswered mail,
I lay without movement and
under the night sky of my
drying work clothes, a strange curtain,
I felt a perfect embrace as the warmth of
my own body took me,
like the horizon takes a meteor,
like a black lake takes a skipping rock.
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