The Bed

The Bed

After My Bed (1998) by Tracey Emin

I heard the artist describe it on the radio:
the unwashed sheets, the condoms and cigarette
packets, vodka bottles that reveal a life sixteen
years in the past. I'm in a car traveling south
out of Chicago, and I leave the city so seldom
that everything out the window fascinates me,
the industry and farmland, mist adrift over brown
grass shining with April frost, a white horse
standing in a small field that is a pocket
between two hills. A few miles on, it is almost
day, and we drive through a shroud of smoke
that seems to come from nowhere. I am still
thinking about Tracey Emin and her bed as self
portrait, already starting to write this poem.
The sun is a giant orange before growing smaller
and turning pink, shifting to our left, and I write
down a few thoughts about artists and ghosts,
being a guest at your own wake, how the ruin
of a bed is its own horizon, day following night
after night after night. Two things from the drive
stay with me: the white horse and that gauzy
wing of smoke that covered the road. Then
the smell that entered the car, insisting that
somewhere nearby, something was burning.