Lying on my futon
I opened your homemade Christmas card.
Loose gold glitter sprinkled
across my black-jerseyed chest,
my navy-blue comforter.
You had turned my bed
to starlight sky
and made me a part of it.
For days
I left the cosmos in tact,
slipping carefully under covers
alone
feeling like a god
enfolded in firmament.
You won’t believe it.
This spring
I cleaned the apartment:
Files lining the cream-colored cabinet,
clothes stacked in the corner
as straight as the books
in unpainted shelves,
audio and video cassettes
columned like giant, surreal teeth
beneath the VCR.
Even the doorway’s Indian rug
now smiles in small loops of pearl white.
Still, sometimes when the light falls right,
I discover a glimpse of star
gleaming on the clean-swept
dark tile bathroom floor
or cradled in cracked pages
of old poetry books
I last read at Christmas.
Roger Armbrust
