In order to understand about my new bed, you have to understand about my old bed. Imagine a 4×6 foot bag of peas. Now imagine an elephant setting its foot down in the middle of that bag. Now imagine yourself falling asleep clinging with all ten fingers to the edge of the pea-bag and waking, every wee hour on the hour, to find yourself in the valley of the footprint. Imagine the dire effects on the no longer 20-year-old back and neck. Imagine the cat’s disgust, imagine the dog’s wounded looks, as they, too, sink into the hollow. It was a blind-date of a bed, bought over the phone in a cold Eastern city some eleven years ago. It was a bed for a student, provided the student preferred to sleep standing up. It was a bed off the end of which skinny ankles hung bare and pale and exposed to cruel breezes, like the ankles of Ichabod Crane. It was a bed of limited imagination, thinking itself primarily designed for sleeping, and except that I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a decade, I can hardly blame it. It did not understand that the bed is the Raft of Life: table, dresser, desk, yoga mat, grooming station, hankie, periodicals rack, phone booth, polling place. The raft sank. The bed was a born failure, and so it failed for all of its 4,015 days until the large men carted it away, sides billowing, edges sagging, springs sprung.

And now? A Baroque cloud. A mollusk. A strawberry shortcake, in which I am the strawberry and the bed is the biscuit smothered in cream. The palm of a French aristocrat. The cotton in the top of the asprin bottle. A petal. An earlobe. The belly fur of a polar bear. The breast feathers of an owl. A tower of silk. A bowl of pudding. A bed fit for a queen.