Amy Gordon
Not Sleeping
In what we call the small hours of the morning
I ask the green darkness produced by the radio
alarm clock why I can’t sleep. There is no answer.
I go into the living room to read Haruki Murakami’s
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the most wonderful
and strange book I have read in a long time. Coming
to the chapter where the narrator is at the bottom
of a well, I learn that when you look up at the sky
during the day when you are in the bottom of a well
you can see the stars. That is 100% interesting,
and also perhaps there is a kernel of hope
in the idea that the stars are always with us,
like ghosts, so even when we can no longer see
the people we love, they speak to us. I put the book
aside, turn on the computer. Its blue light enters
my eyes as I turn to the New York Times home page.
Why would I do that? Why the need to know the next
vile thing? Electrons, electromagnetic, small things
they call tweets are vibrating throughout our world,
keeping me from sleep. I need to step into the forest,
to lie down in green darkness where I can see stars
caught between leaves. It will be night. Real night.
Amy Gordon is the author of numerous books for young readers, including When JFK Was My Father (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) and Painting the Rainbow (Holiday House, 2014), both works of historical fiction haunted by helpful ghosts. Her poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Aurorean, Plum, and the anthology Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books, 2018).
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