POEM
Insomnia & So On
Fat bed, lick the black cat in my mouth
each morning. Unfasten all the bones
that make a head, and let me rest: unknown
among the oboe-throated geese gone south
to drop their down and sleep beside the out-
bound tides. Now there’s no nighttime I can own
that isn’t anxious as a phone
about to ring. Give me some doubt
on loan; give me a way to get away
from what I know. I pace until the sun
is in my window. I lie down. I’m a coal:
I smolder to a bloodshot glow. Each day
I die down in my bed of snow, undone
by my red mind and what it woke.
Source: Poetry (September 2009).
This poem originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of Poetry.
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Malachi Black is literary editor of the New York Quarterly and a James A. Michener . . . MORE »
