Pastan - Insomnia: poems

Insomnia Copyright 2015 by Linda Pastan All rights reserved
First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
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Production manager: Louise Mattarelliano The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Pastan, Linda, date.
[Poems. Selections]
Insomnia : poems / Linda Pastan.
pages ; cm
ISBN 978-0-393-24718-3 (hardcover)
I.

Title.
PS3566.A775A6 2015
811'.54dc23 2015019106 ISBN 978-0-393-24719-0 (e-book) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com W. W. W. W.

NORTON & COMPANY Independent Publishers Since 1923New York | London Sleep has stepped out for a smoke and may not be back. The sun is waiting in the celestial green room, practicing its flamboyant entrance. In the hour of the wolf there is only the clock for company, ticking through the dark remorseless stations of the night. Someone has spilled the moon all over the trees; someone is cutting down the trees, branch by forked branch soon there will be nothing left but kindling. Why am I afraid of the dark but more afraid of what the light reveals: this moonlight which lies everywhere like a beautiful torn shroud; the illumination of dreams, room after room of dreams? Is it the moon itself I fear, in too many pieces now to put back together? Or the stars, light-years away, my voice traveling towards them in a blind trajectory? I fear the earth as it warms and freezes; I fear your arms which hold me a moment and disappear. Consider the white space between words on a page, not just the margins around them.

Or the space between thoughts: instants when the mind is inventing exactly what it thinks and the mouth waits to be filled with language. Consider the space between lovers after a quarrel, the white sheet a cold metaphor between them. Now picture the brief space before death enters, hat in hand: these vanishing years, filled with light. The clouds dissolve in snow a simple act of physics or the urge to just let go? On hills, on frozen lakes all definition fades before the rush of flakes until, bereft of light, the moon gives up her sovereign claim to white. Hes out rescuing his fallen hollies after the renegade snowstorm, sawing their wounded limbs off quite mercilessly (I think of the scene in Kings Row, the young soldier waking to find his legs gone). Hes tying up young bamboo their delicate tresses litter the driveway shoveling a door through the snow to free the imprisoned azaleas.

I half expect him to tend his trees with aspirin and soup, the gardener who finds in destruction the very reason to carry on; who would look at the ruins of Eden and tell the hovering angel to put down his sword, there was work to be done. Counting sheep, the scientists suggested, may simply be too boring to do for very long, while images of a soothing shoreline... are engrossing enough to concentrate on. The New York Times When I reach a thousand I start to notice how the eyes of one ewe are wide, as if with worry about her lamb or how cold the flock will be after the shearing. At a thousand fifty I notice a ram pushing up against a soft and curly female, and for a moment Im distracted by errant images of sex. Its difficult to keep so many sheep in line for counting they are not a parade but more like a roiling sea of whitecaps, which makes me think of the shore of all those boring grains of sand to keep track of as they slip through the fingers, of all the dangers of sunstroke, riptide, jellyfish.

The scientists fall asleep lulled by equations, dreaming of test tubes. I fall asleep at last by counting them: biologist, physicist, astronomer, and all the many experts on the subject of sleep. Moon, half rusted away in the suns indomitable shadow, I stand at the frosted window wrapped in a flannel robe and see not what Galileo saw a universe of planets spinning like plates from the hands of a master juggler but you, our one moon, slender at times, at times full as a breast brimming with milky light. If the sun is a warrior in flaming armor, the moon is a ghost disappearing, leaving behind the merest trace of stars. Lying on our backs together in the cool August grass under a sky already starry to the very rind, we wait to be drenched in light, for shooting stars those pinballs on the table of heaven to careen by, for a shower of gold, like Zeus descending on the Dana with only lust in mind. Our sleepy, domesticated earth with its valleys and flowers, looped ribbons of river, voluptuous clouds, awakens after a long sleep shaking itself and with a roar (wild beast after all) sends houses, hilltops, tree trunks spilling off its rough back.

An asteroid has landed in our garden, or a giant brain, ripped from its skull this monstrous root ball torn from the ground when the poplar it fed was assaulted by wind. The workmen had to saw for days, hauling the wood away with backhoes. Now it simply lies there, filled with soil and ropy vegetation: a breastgreat nourisherwithout its body, a bruised fist without its arm, a giant ball of yarn with lengths of root, like knitting needles, sticking out, pointing in all directions: to the labyrinthine subway rumbling under city streets, to the secret map of blood under the skin. I can only call it post post modernthis music let loose by the blackbirds as they swarm south abandoning trees those leafy songbooks like individual notes gone mad. And the woods ring with the first sounds of autumn, raucous and dark, before a single leaf has changed. When Dido embraced her own sword, she left Aeneas behind founding his city, while she became a different kind of legend, no longer the understudy to her own lifethe queen of abandoned women no longer a lonely solo but the better part of a duet.

And voices would sing it, would inscribe her beauty note by note into the scrolled music of air, would tell how her final marriage bed was fire, fire, fire. There are so few of them at first a mere rustle on the wind with just a hint of red or gilt along their edges, and the mother woods are still green, and the sun still spills its molten light on upturned faces; no one worries if a few are falling they are simply grace notes, wisps of portent, though soon they turn acrobatic showing their bellies to the breeze, soon a few more wordlessly shake looseearly soldiers of the season, no smoke yet, no raging flames of color. But make no mistake, something is coming to an end. Pillars of fire? The trees in autumn. One small flame? Head of a woodpecker at the feeder. The wind is nothing but blind acceleration, blowing us over Octobers rough-hewn threshold.

Why are these old, gnarled trees so beautiful, while I am merely old and gnarled? If I had leaves, perhaps, or apples... if I had bark instead of this lined skin, maybe the wind would wind itself around my limbs in its old sinuous dance. I shall bite into an apple and swallow the seeds. I shall come back as a tree. A minute before 5 am, the alarm clock slumbering in its bed of numbers, I wait for the storied wind and think of the quahog, snug in its house of shell, as the gull approaches. I hear the throb of a hammer over the beating of the rain.

My neighbor nailing canvas to his split roof, or Noah making preparations? In the aftermath, the hollies with their green leaves lean all the way over, as though they were listening for something through a door in the air. Our final dogwood leans over the forest floor offering berries to the birds, the squirrels. Its a relic of the days when dogwoods flourishedcreamy lace in April, spilled milk in May their beauty delicate but commonplace. When I took for granted that the world would remain as it was, and I would remain with it. Late in October, I watch it all unravelthe whole autumn leafery succumbing to rain. At the moment of their most intense beauty, reds and yellows bleed into each other like dried paints on a palette those ghosts of pictures never painted.