Desert morning sunrise poured through the skylight
emblazoning the ivory disarray –
pillows, sheets, blankets, limbs –
long before one of the peaceful sleepers hoped to wake.
The poet sleeps more lightly than the storyteller.
I awoke, slipped out of bed so as not to disturb.
Listened to the rhythmic sounds and silences of your breath,
watched your lips part,
your eyelids tremble,
you cover your eyes with the arm you’d held me in all night.
Your body registered the light,
but not my absence from the bed.
Evidence of our union surrounded me:
smudged wine glasses, remnants of chocolate and fruit and nuts and cheeses, the ice mostly melted in the bucket still holding the last pour of the boutique Chardonnay/Semillon I had sent up to the room as a surprise, your shoes, socks, pants, shirt, boxer shorts dropped like stepping stones in a Japanese garden leading from the door to the bed, my underthings in a separate pattern, haphazard, leading nowhere, and on the bedside tables, two pair of eyeglasses, two cell phones charging, two torn condom wrappers.
And yet.
As I watched you sleep, I felt the pang of separateness.
Sleep is the private world we can’t penetrate, allowing in the phantasms we create like tile mosaics from memories, interpretations, embellishments, the blending of unrelated people, time and events as if we start with solid forms, sprinkle in false hopes and old wounds, stir in the cauldron of the eternal-internal timescape which obeys none of the rules that operate when we open our eyes,
squinting in pain at the exquisite beauty of a sunlit room bursting awake
at a seemingly un-godly hour
which is, more likely,
the Godliest hour of the day.