counterpane: the bed of illness & recovery

the mountain: like a body

beneath a blanket

– after Ransetsu

still me, it seems, awake in the quiet

of another room

healing loves to wrap itself

in a blanket

open the window

shoo the fug out the room

soft orders of quilt

marshal my dreams

seeing the mattress in the street we share a laugh:

she wants to bounce on it, I want a lie down

it’s wise to pack your own parachute

& make your own bed

whumping the pillows

care not cure

for the sake of equality

shake the duvet


















her fists sleep tight

fillips of light blow in at the window


pain stays within the blanket

speech reaches out of the bed

the sheet’s daubed with dark patches

for the ill blankets are a sign of labour

sheets a sign of defeat

in the realm of health

sleep is wealth

the setting in which a body

rests its landscape: blanket

beneath the nullity of the blanket

there is the good of a rest

some climb the hills with their legs

others use their knees to shape duvet mountains

for the bed-bound the idea of ‘free time’, ‘leisure time’, or ‘rest’, is insulting

time in bed is devoted to long spells of laboured passivity

seeking brief episodes of recovery


rest is shelter for a body filled with weather

from that day on her bed became a den

bedrooms can be navigated in terms of distant inaccessible landscapes

tweed is the closest cultural approximation of nature

there should be no moving thing in the bedroom

except perhaps a candle flame

we each have a bedtime name

Ransetsu, retranslated from the Spanish of Jorge Carrera Andrade by Joshua Beckman and Alejandro de Acosta

Some of these poems were first exhibited in the exhibition, Day of Access, Travelling Gallery, 2019; some were first published in Paidemua magazine, 2020.

Alec Finlay

photographs by Hannah Devereux, originally published in A Far-off Land.