The Poet on insomnia is the gap that cannot open

Nothing tickles here. Knock, and the wall answers solid, because something grew through it: lime, horsehair, a hundred winters of saying deadline until the guards went home. Bring a chisel. There’s a window underneath. It’ll remember it was glass.

 

Nothing tickles here. Knock, and the wall answers who’s there? The ceiling is forecast. The limbs are forecast. The silence is forecast to the decibel. At three a.m. the watchman asks the watch whether the watch is over, and the asking is a lantern, and the lantern is the watch. Dig here and under the forecast there’s only more forecast, all the way down.

 

Nothing tickles here. Knock, and the wall says there is no wall. It says this to every knuckle, every grain, every hour, a voice kept up at enormous cost to announce that nothing needs announcing. Dig, and the shovel is told there is no ground. Eyes wide in the dark, reporting: no one is awake.

 

 

Same surface. Three undersides.

 

 

You can’t climb down into sleep. The language knew this before we buried the knowing: we fall.

Only the stone that forgot it was falling ever lands.

The rest of us stand on the last rung watching our own feet, gripping the ladder all night, proving, correctly, that we’re gripping it.

 

 

Say fall asleep slowly. Hear the drop that’s still in it.

Now stop listening for it —