Making Your Bed

In your whole life, on how many objects
Have you rested your sleeping head?
Take a minute to think. We’ll wait.

How many of those objects—pillows,
Wadded coats and jackets, cushions—
Stones? Moss? Bricks?—still exist?

Pillows alone, do you know how many,
Or remember what most of them were like,
The individuals, not the types? Gone,

Aren’t they? Struggle to recall any hotel,
The first exciting, scary night with a new
Lover, or in a new country, or both.

Work hard—what were your parents’
Pillows like, the headrest of your first car,
The one you slept in on the ferry

To where was it, exactly? Exactly. Gone—
There, in a way, faint ghosts in synapses,
But gone. Consider tonight. Now carry on.