Sleepwork

Abstract

Sleepwork Campbell McGrath (bio) a Pecha Kucha after Terrance Hayes Reading Late Reading late, globed in shaded lamp light, the family long asleep, the house restored to its timbre of groaning night sounds, a nocturne of peeping tree frogs, the soft moans of palm fronds and termite-ridden beams. Syntax Deep, sensual pleasure of the book—crack of a taut spine, allure of the page and its must, its skitter, its ply—life as it exists there, as we exist in it, reflections in a drop of mercury, all the letters of all the alphabets of every language harnessed to meaning by syntax. A Paper Boat At last I can be free and alone and fold my news into a paper boat I step into and set sail at once to live my life inside the dream. Dream #1 He dreams that a giraffe is eating his toes, he dreams of emolument, lucre, a jar of balm. Dream #2 He dreams of espionage, a set of codes and tasks too complex to understand, even in the dream it is clear how pointless it all is, and he dismisses that dream, and moves on. [End Page 139] Sleepwork The soul’s calibration, the heart’s equivocation, the proving of axioms, harmonic incandescence, tightening the weave, stacking bales, concourse with whales, lapidary illumination, lantern trimming, ore refining, dream-mining, cavern travel. Like a fat hound to the scent, like the laziest of honeybees, like a basking shark. What He Thinks This is what I get paid for, he thinks—rising from bed to jot down in his notebook the poem streaming like an illustrated tickertape through his head—except for the part about getting paid. The Moon Poetry is ancient, preliterate, as are curses and vows, promises to the gods, entreaties to lovers in our abandonment. Babies are born wailing, Irish kings are mourned by banshees. Even wolves know enough to howl at the moon. Dream #3 He dreams of falling asleep, and waking up ravenous, and falling asleep again, and wonders within the dream whether he really did wake up, and if so, what he ate for breakfast. Weaponry Poetry is language’s arsenal, its firing range, its crucible, its keep—but it cannot harm a butterfly or deflect a single bullet from its course. [End Page 140] Hive Music Nobody fully understands the sorcery by which we come to possess and be possessed by words, but everybody hums along. We are always alone when we write, but we are never alone within language. This accounts for the mysterious nocturnes he hears in his dreams: hive music. Dream #4 He has never seen the river he is dreaming but it is full of nuclear submarines and his kayak is full of holes. Lineation Front lines, credit lines, bread lines, lines of demarcation, blood lines, punch lines, lines of broken glass, lines of trees in windrows across a far field, blue hills in broken lines on the horizon, blurred lines, white lines, lines in the sand, lines of questioning, life lines, tag lines, stat lines, lines of code, stress lines, fracture lines, fate lines, last lines, lines of birds flying south against the coming frost, lines of golden tiles in an unfinished mosaic. Japanese Eggplant What was learned in the garden today is not a dream but a tactile memory, a prickling in the fingertips at the border between waking and sleep—that the leaves of the Japanese eggplant hide amid their profusion a host of invisible thorns. Dream #5 He tries to name the city he is dreaming and when he smells tahini and poppy seeds he thinks, Atlantic Avenue, so this is Brooklyn. [End Page 141] Dream #6 He dreams of the old Italian restaurant in Washington with Chianti bottles covered in red wax, a jukebox of arias from Aida and Don Giovanni, the courtyard fountain of Poseidon in which he floated boats made from corks and toothpicks with his brother, brackish water alive with black eels served to favored customers, swish of their tails below the surface like prehistoric creatures drowning in tar, like the downstroke of a dozen bows as the violins commence the second movement adagio. Dream...