The Sleeping Husband

This massive apartment: a whole room left

Empty to air, where we used to sleep.

So many steps on the waxed wood, like off turns

On the dial of a lock whose combination one’s lost—

All decaying about me like empire,

The moldings moldering while I sit frozen

As a swan on the surface of a lake changing to ice.

Fruit flies and mosquitoes, a water bug,

Carpet beetles, the mouse found behind the couch

Months after it’d shrunk to a puff of fur:

Nothing to eat here but beer and more dark.

The shower where someone’s young wife died

In an explosion of epilepsy while he slept.

One wonders what he was dreaming then.

The same dreams we once made here, maybe.