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.
Copyright © 2018 by Monica Ferrell. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 5, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Once, in my apartment, I dropped a heavy object onto the floor; my neighbor came barreling up the stairs in a panic that something might have happened to me. Apparently a former tenant had died suffering an epileptic seizure in the shower, where she fell and struck her head. ‘Did she live alone?’ I asked. At the time, I did. ‘She had a husband,’ my neighbor explained, ‘but he was in the bedroom. He just kept right on sleeping.’”
—Monica Ferrell
Monica Ferrell
