My insomnia is getting absurd. It is purely literary. I lay in bed reciting lines of poetry from Keats, Shelley, Donne, Wordsworth, Hart Crane: “Insistently through sleep– a tide of voices– They meet you listening midway in your dream…” Now I know those lines by Crane are literal. My insomnia is like a poem being written in black space. It is like a poem that wants to be translated into light. It is like a feeling that grips my intestines with linked verses and won’t let go.
Month: December 2018
A Boulder Field in Nova Scotia
In this field the boulders seem hollow.
They contain a kind of solid sorrow.
They set out to complete the landscape
Like painters on a flat canvas.
In the field the fog is stone,
You’re breathing into the unknown.
The boulders mark a withdrawn world
That’s present in their path,
And since their path is the past
Thrown forward where they stand,
The immense round weight of each
Is lessened incrementally in all.
Aligned like planets, they warp
Our reality amid the lesser stars.
Salvatore Ala 