Insomnia
by Rose Lemberg
At sunset all my thoughts are meshed into a gray
anxiety of streets perused by light,
the future sputters, dies, it doesn't matter.
I wrap myself in cashmere scarves of breath
and button up the old incomprehension,
Walk out. Between the river in the alleyways
the beast of dreams rotates inside my silence,
the ancient sphinx rotates the universe.
And every night he calls me by the name,
The sounds are bolts that hold my bridges solid,
The sounds are bolts that fall away from me
Exposing hope. A step will take me through
To older skies, where weeds embrace all worries,
And music melts my sleep into the bone.
Caressed by time, I linger by that door,
Caressing time, I let the silence answer,
I let the silence reinterpret my regrets
And trap my thoughts inside its viscous amber,
And spill them easy all along the Milky Way.
His sandstone paws translate the night for me
into the city and its dreamy argot,
And it no longer matters to be free.
Rose Lemberg received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and now teaches Nostalgic and Marginal Studies somewhere in the Midwest. Her office is a cavern with no windows. When nobody's looking, the walls glint with diamonds or perhaps tears, and the fiddlers dance inside the books. Rose's poems appeared or are forthcoming in GUD, Abyss and Apex, Mythic Delirium, and Star*line. Rose doesn't know why she writes. She likes to take walks in the darkness, when the stars call out to each other; they speak in triangles and squares. Although Rose feels most at home in the great cities, she lives in a small town. She sometimes writes in her LiveJournal. Her favorite fruit is the Asian pear.
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