Psalm after psalm into a dead sea of silence: they invite their own enormous, endangered day. Scalded, lord, by sunlight and the lizards watching, licking dust,

he unfolds the fresh sheets: brisk sniff of laundry, white as a field of Queen Anne’s lace. The word “linen” comes to rest, a cleansing breath, and a big sail bellies

in the breeze he conjures, speaking its memory of flax and water, acres of raw linen in the Low Countries or the black North laid out like a waiting canvas, a picture-glimpse of heaven

with a few shriven women’s bodies adrift in it, dazzled by its dear, old-world, breathing spaces. He billows the sheet and a wondercloud swells in this small room, a huge

snow-ruffle drifting down, a tabernacle of cool white rising in the desert. Here is the bed new made, and here its play of flesh and spirit, unsettling themselves in bodies.

He is alone here, making the bed up, stopped between the solidity of things as they are and the huge white peace of the sheet-sail flapping from his hands for a matter of seconds

and subsiding, spread flat, its corners pointed towards where she leans–half-dressed in memory, one soft stroke of daylight streaking her spine–

to draw taut the sheet he’s holding the other side of and they snap together, lay flat, tug it tight together in what looks like a fullness of time and truth

and not plummeting asunder. Lying alone between the sheets tonight, feeling the clean of them, their white arms tight around him, he will dream

a wilderness of tents in moonlight: asleep, they will be shivering a little, as if they felt the stars press their chill rivets in, or the future

with red eyes whispering to rouse them.