Last Mattress
This $1,600 slice of foam,
if it stays firm, will be the last mattress
I’ll ever buy. It’s comfortable enough
for years of sleeps, for the long, thwarted hours
of scribbling sentences, or to step from
into the surrey with the fringe on top.
Given the choice between flat-lining here,
and 1,000,000 other possibilities
for the time when my pronouns and now end—
I’d pick my bed, and passing on with good dreams.
One jot, on this little blue and green globe
where life evolved, and consciousness, and hope.
Copyright © 2022 by Marilyn Nelson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 8, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Three images surprised me: first, the poet writing in bed. I, myself, do not write in bed. I think that image is a vague, literary allusion to a pale, suffering, young Romantic or Victorian poet; lots of lace curtains. Then, the marriage of Ms. Dickinson and Oklahoma! The surprise of ‘my pronouns and now’ kind of made me laugh. But the poem is a pretty serious meditation about what a good death would be. And, anyway, it asks, what does any individual, terrestrial life or death matter when seen from a galactic perspective? Yet, we still throb.”
—Marilyn Nelson
Marilyn Nelson
Marilyn Nelson was born in Cleveland on April 26, 1946, to Melvin M. Nelson, a U.S. serviceman in the Air Force and a member of the last class to graduate from air cadet training at Tuskegee Institute. Nelson’s mother, Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, was a teacher. Brought up first on one military base and then another, Nelson started writing while still in elementary school. She earned her BA from the University of California, Davis, and holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (MA, 1970) and the University of Minnesota (PhD, 1979).