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Late at Night in Bed

By Gregory Djanikian b. 1949 Gregory Djanikian

My wife tells me she hears a beetle

Scurrying across the kitchen floor.

She says our daughter is dreaming

Too loudly, just listen, her eyelids

Are fluttering like butterflies.

What about the thunder, I say,

What about the dispatches from the police car

Parked outside, or me rolling over like a whale?

She tells me there’s a leaf falling

And grazing the downstairs window,

Or it could be glass cutters, diamonds,

Thieves working their hands toward the latch.

She tells me our son is breathing too quickly,

Is it pneumonia, is it the furnace

Suddenly pumping monoxides through the house?

So when my wife says sleep, she means

A closing of the eyes, a tuning

Of the ears to ultra frequencies.

(It is what always happens

When there are children, the bed

Becoming at night a listening post,

Each little ting forewarning disaster.)

Downstairs there is the sound

Of something brushing against something else

And I try to listen as my wife might listen,

Insects, I say, dust on a table top,

Maybe a knife’s edge against the palm.

But she tells me it’s only

The African violet on the windowsill

Putting out another flower,

And falls luxuriously into a dream

Of being awake and vigilant.

So the house grows noisier,

There are clicks in the woodwork,

There are drips, raps, clunks, things

To make sense of, make benign.

My son and daughter are sleeping calmly,

And the stairs, yes, are creaking,

The wind, I think, or maybe two men,

Where’s the beaker of acid,

The bowling ball, the war hoop

I learned in second grade?

So this is what it’s like when there’s

No one left but you to love and defend.

Outside there are cats in a fight

And they remind me too much of babies crying.

Then the bottle thrown against the stoop,

The sound of something delicate shattered.

My wife stirs, Be glad, she says,

Sound doesn’t carry far, that you don’t hear

The whole of it, cries in the night,

Children in other cities, hurts, silences.

And she’s right, I can’t hear the whole of it,

Or else I hear too much and it’s noise

Or I make it noise because it’s too much.

So I begin homing in on something

Around me, something distinct, my wife’s

Breathing, a window’s rattle. Outside,

Grass is lengthening in the dark,

And sap running up the phloem of the maple,

(Do I hear it? And how the stars must be wheeling!)

And in the far room, my children’s

Hearts are keeping time, for them, for us

Who have begun to listen in earnest.

Gregory Djanikian, “Late at Night in Bed” from Falling Deeply into America. Copyright © 1989 by Gregory Djanikian. Used by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press.

Source: Poetry (May 1988).

Biography

Gregory Djanikian’s collections include So I Will Till the Ground (2007), Years Later (2000), Falling Deeply into America (1989), and The Man in the Middle (1984). His poems have also appeared in numerous magazines and journals, such as Poetry, the Nation, and the American Scholar, as well as on television, when he was featured on PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

His work explores, among other things, the private and public . . .

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