Warming the Bed

by Lance Larsen

Arctic Delight, we called that lofty, drafty blue cloud
of a bedroom. And took turns warming it—

one poem per night, Rumi, always Rumi.
Candle shadows licking the walls, we read with pet

names and piano fingers, praying Persian heat
would thaw that lozenge of our marriage bed.

Mediterranean wine in new vessels, etc.
And when verse failed us, we used a blow dryer.

 

Lance Larsen’s second poetry collection, In All Their Animal Brilliance (2005), won the Tampa Review Prize. Recent poems have appeared in Georgia Review, Orion, Southern Review, Antioch Review, and The Pushcart Book of Poetry: the Best Poems from the First 30 Years. A professor of English at Brigham Young University, he received a 2007 NEA fellowship in poetry. (6/2007)