When moths fly away from the blown-out light,
the bed is an island.
Among cottons and rumpled cloths
is unquestioned passion,
a memory of the future,
and the newly born and purely clean
is given to the mother.
Between the human and all the rest
lies only an eyelid.
Asleep, a person is unburdened,
the human no longer a hunter.
A cat climbs to the chest
and sits with the rise and fall of breath.
A child cries himself to sleep,
a woman turns inward,
or a man toward perfume.
The bed holds a person from before history
and the many claims of darkness,
though nothing here is owned.
The greeds that lie
within ourselves give way.
In the house of flesh,
the vines of what is daily unremembered
climb walls and enter doors,
seed themselves in the cracked roof.
Above, storms pass over.
There are galaxies. The turn of stars,
and directions no one follows by day
are taken. You go there, fearless for once,
to where we slept on moss in the forest
with planets in a known circle
of sky above, to where there was never a roof,
and there is bone memory,
the opening of other eyes
to vision with no seeing.
Even in the coldest heart,
we are mostly tender here,
swimmers breathing.
You are suddenly in still, clean water.
The rocks at the bottom of the pool
are clear.
It does all this because there is something
just as close to grace as death
and just as close to mercy
and because something in a life
has to matter.