poem: A weekly poem, read by the author.

Insomniac

By Benjamin Gantcher
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2003, at 11:36 AM ET

Listen to Benjamin Gantcher reading this poem.

His job is to ignore the burlap sheet and sleep.
Ignore the wadded comforter, bed down inside the tattered
slab of cold that keeps the August miasma off their heads.
Count her scant, slow breaths until, in sympathy, his lungs
stick. The clock of light the blinds cut shows him that he is
between time. Gnash and tighten all he wants. How the starved
lions feel in the lithograph because they can't
eat Daniel in the pit. Furious and cowed and awed. Stripped
of their skin the things of the nighttime world are
raw and menacing. This wakefulness is not him
but now a leftover simulacrum that he animates,
a secret battery. What spell will break him out if he can't manage
a sentence worth waking her up? But there is a ritual
of summoning. They have a covenant. He has to offer
up his back and her rump presses, like a thumbprint, her seal. Contort
his arm behind him and in this way may approach the swoop
and table, palm the contour and praise the desert hairs. She mixes croon
and complaint and repeats the message he maneuvered for. Yes,
sleep. Then the spirit withdraws. On the scrabble hillside
inside him a shale plate is dislodged. A thousand fossils
slide to the bottom of a cleft. The dust climbs into the gas
and glitters. It doesn't matter now that his constellations
won't be mapped. His feet find her feet. The long toes and dry arches
stroke his, softer than memory. The ceremony is nearly complete.
It's tempting to snuffle at her temple and hairline, but he won't
profane her favor, miss the small collapse once the word
is spoken and she can descend. Her skin discovers the utterness
of his gratitude intact. A psalm. And he sleeps.

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Benjamin Gantcher's poems have appeared and are forthcoming in several journals and magazines, including Archipelago, Grand Street, and Tin House.
Click here to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.


To submit poetry to Slate, send up to five poems and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to: Robert Pinsky, Slate Magazine, Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA, 02215.
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