Bedtime

It was enough to open to the page

where I left off. Where you had asked me, hated

question, what are you reading? Where I was

when a sudden breeze lifted and blew all the curtains, the ones in the

bathroom too, just next to the toilet, where you sat, where

you had to catch them, and pin them shut with your fingers

so that the neighbors wouldn't see.

I found the page, and I had more than one choice

of method. Without bookmark, I could have let

the book fall open

to its natural spinal crease, its

memory of me, bending it back

to flatten the pages. My

I was here. I could have remembered

page seventy-eight, or remembered a certain thickness, skimmed through until

finding unfamiliar words.

I found the page where I left off, and you

came to bed. It was enough to open to it

while listening to the sighs of the maple trees

the irregular little scrape of the drawn shade against the windowsill

that might or might not make it

hard for me to fall asleep. It was enough

to find page seventy-eight, the page-facing-page

juxtaposition of what I remembered from before, and

the utterly unknowable to come, except perhaps

your habit of raising the shade a few inches

in any steady amount of breeze

it was enough

that we got there.