Seven short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and Nancy Ellison's poem still holds a whole absence inside one morning in bed. Almost nothing happens. The speaker wakes, lingers, notices their own hair, and thinks of a pillow. Yet the poem is about how a missing person survives in the smallest physical details, and how loneliness can arrive as a smell instead of a grand emotion.
The opening, "i lie long mornings," is slow even to say. The l-sounds of "lie long" and the stretched vowels make the line lie there itself. The plural "mornings" suggests a habit rather than a single lazy day, and a person who stays in bed for long mornings may be resting or may simply be unwilling to start. The poem doesn't choose between these. The lowercase "i" and the lack of punctuation add to the effect: the voice sounds half-awake, or like something jotted in a private notebook.
The strangest image comes next: "sample the bird roosting in my tangle / called hair." Hair becomes a nest, and the shape of the unbrushed mess becomes a creature settled on the speaker's head. "Sample" is an unexpected verb. It belongs to tasting wine or trying a stranger's cooking, so it makes the speaker's own body feel newly discovered and slightly foreign. The line break before "called hair" deepens this. The phrase arrives like a correction from a muddled mind, as if the speaker must remind themselves what this thing is. It captures the fogginess of waking with unusual accuracy.
The next lines add a second mystery: the tangle was "left there by hands / to confuse my awaking." Whose hands? The poem never says. Because the following lines turn to "your," it is natural to read them as the hands of a lover, but that is an inference, and the poem keeps the hands detached and unclaimed, as though they had left evidence behind and gone. "Confuse" is a good choice too. The tangle disorients the speaker, and so does the half-second of waking in a bed where someone else's touch is remembered but no longer there. Even "awaking" is a little shorter and quicker than the more usual "awakening," as if the moment itself is cut short.
Then comes the turn. Until now the poem has been all "i" and "my." In the last two lines a second person finally appears: "i am reminded of your pillow and the smell / it caught from you." The "you" arrives late and is present only through an object. The verb "caught" is the most important word in the poem, because it echoes "tangle." Hair is tangled, a bird is roosting, a pillow has caught a scent, and everything in the poem is snagged or held, as in a net. The pillow keeps what its owner has taken away. The line break after "smell" also makes us wait a beat before learning the smell came "from you," and the poem ends on that word.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short and uneven, and three of the breaks cut through a phrase ("my tangle / called hair," "hands / to confuse," "smell / it caught"). These enjambments work like small stumbles, the way a mind surfaces from sleep in jolts. The softer consonants, the l's of "pillow" and "smell" especially, return at the end to the gentle sound of the first line, so the poem feels closed around its own quiet.
What makes it significant is its restraint. It never uses words like "miss," "lonely," or "love," and it never tells us whether the "you" is gone for good or only away. All the feeling is carried by hair, a pillow and a smell, and the reader has to do the final work of understanding. Because the poem stops without a resolution or a comforting last thought, the absence stays open, as unresolved as the speaker's morning.