Untitled Document
daughterpoem #4
(1973: found taped to the
bathroom mirror
when I
returned from a late class.
Author: Megan Jackson,
17)
DO NOT FLUSH ZE POT OR
YOU MAY VIND YOURSELV
VITH MOP IN
HAND AND ANKLE WRAPPED IN VET TOILET PAPER VITH SHIT BETVEEN TOEZ
VADING IN SVIRLING WATER . . .
© Jacqueline Jackson 2008
If one believes television commercials, insomnia,
that thief of sleep, torments humans in ever-increasing numbers. Rynn
Williams, a poet working in Brooklyn, N.Y., tries here to identify its
causes and find a suitable remedy.
Insomnia
I try tearing paper into tiny, perfect squares
—
they cut my fingers. Warm milk, perhaps, stirred counter-clockwise in a cast iron pan
—
but even then there’s burning at the edges, angry foam-hiss. I’ve been told to put trumpet flowers under my pillow, I do: stamen up, the old crone said. But the pollen stains, and there are bees, I swear, in those long yellow chambers, echoing, the way the house does, mocking, with its longevity —
each rib creaking and bending where I’m likely
to break —
I try floating out along the long O of lone, to where it flattens to loss, and just stay there disconnecting the dots of my night sky as one would take apart a house made of sticks, carefully, last addition to first, like sheep leaping backward into their pens.
Poem copyright © 2008 by Rynn Williams, whose
most recent book of poetry is Adonis Garage (University of Nebraska Press, 2005). Poem reprinted from Columbia Poetry Review (No.
20, Spring 2007), by permission of Rynn Williams. American Life in Poetry
is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also
supported by the Department of English at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. poet laureate
2004-2006. For more information, go to www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2008.
