Between Season Insomnia
My fear a squirrel has jumped the neighbor’s oak to gnaw the new roof’s edge circumvents a worry-free repose.
Forget diamonds, rubies and jade from dreams contrived. It’s sleep I need now.
Long gone are the restless rhythms of youth that roused me early for morning laps before noon’s shadow squared across the pool.
Now sleep, it’s me who chases you through this creaking house this eve where unsettling noises loom against warped summer screens
Where midnight rain navigates a rusty gutter bulging with leaves and high winds splatter fall’s residue against the window frame, forcing their ride through the first night rallies,
Oh, calamity crowds me, I am only barely safe!
I say to you, oh mighty sleep, let me be the river just this once let me be the noise outside this room,
let me be the fearless squirrel that jumps hara-kiri in between the lightning and the fence,
let me be all these things, and then wake courageous
before the squalls come, wresting quiet requiems within the drifts and dunes.
THERESA WYATT, a visual artist and former teacher, has returned to writing poetry and the “Art of Narrative Medicine.”
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