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I wake up too early and lie uncovered
on the summer bed,
hands behind my head,
staring at the cream-colored walls,
the white closet doors,
listening to the hum of the fan
which has drawn in the cooler night air,
and glancing over at your ghost-form next to me
wrapped tightly in a sheet.
I would like to be as empty
as the rice bowls of the dead,
but I see a squirrel on the hickory tree outside
with a nut in his mouth,
a reminder of the need to save,
and on the wall, a mirror
containing a small oval edition of this room
brings my vanity to mind.
I hear the faint hum of a plane,
and I picture a woman in a window seat
crossing her legs and opening a magazine,
then I think of the Wright brothers
working in their small bicycle shop,
spoked wheels hanging from nails in the walls.
Even the sight of my own feet,
crossed on the bed, reminds me of something –
in this case, the sinewy feet of the saints
that I used to kneel before as a boy –
the feet of St. Bartholomew,
the feet of St. Anthony of the Desert,
braided with muscle,
the feet of St. Sebastian pierced with arrows,
and the benevolent feet of St. Francis
who, in one painting,
is leaning back in rapture
outside the mouth of a cave
while behind him an iconographic rabbit
crouches in a stone wall,
a little symbol of God knows what.
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