Beds that went somewhere

On the wall a bed doesn’t stay where it was made. A brass bed has put up its sheets for sails and is crossing a salt flat at sunset, a track behind it; another, its duvet heaped, hangs on a bedroom wall like a painting; in a timber room a fitted sheet is stretched over the floor and up every wall, so the room is now the bed; under a lifted duvet there is a summer meadow, and inside a torn pillow an ice cave; a porcelain bed lies in shards round a small red cube of jelly; a desk lamp’s light has pressed a dent into a pillow; a linen pillow turns, halfway along, into a river stone.

A bed is the one way out of the day that everybody takes, and these are beds that took it further than usual: some went, some opened onto somewhere else, and one took the whole room. What is under a duvet or inside a pillow is there to be looked at, like the places packed into luggage. Like everything on the wall, the pictures are machine-made.