Sleeplessness

After a weekend full of plentiful and restful sleep, I had a bad bout of insomnia last night.There aren't many pleasures to insomnia, except for the quiet reading time. Once I accept that I cannot sleep and drag myself out of bed, I usually enjoy the quiet, late-night time, the sense that I have no place to be and nothing to do.

Last night, I read a fascinating New Yorker article about Colorado uranium mining towns that have been gutted and razed due to radiation. Despite the health concerns that plague the towns, the "uranium widows" would happily welcome back the uranium mining industry. You can read an abstract here, but it's definitely worth tracking down the whole article.

I also read more of The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, which I've been working on for awhile. It's not the cheeriest late night reading, but it's a great anthology, in part because editor Kevin Young does such an excellent job of mixing old and new poems. The poems in the collection are varied in age and style and message, but Young is nearly unfailing in his ability to choose compelling poems from excellent poets.

Here are two of my favorites from the collection. The first is a poem by Mary Oliver that I heard her read last fall. I liked it then, too, but these days it seems so important to remember these lines: "When it's over, I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."

I read the Galway Kinnell poem for the first time in this anthology. It's so beautiful, so simple and spare, that I couldn't resist posting it here. It has that ring of trueness to it that all poems should have, no matter what their message or style.

----------

When Death Comes

Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. 

---------- 

Wait

Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now. 

Distrust everything, if you have to. 

But trust the hours. Haven't they 

carried you everywhere, up to now? 

Personal events will become interesting again. 

Hair will become interesting. 

Pain will become interesting. 

Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. 

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, 

their memories are what give them 

the need for other hands. And the desolation 

of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness 

carved out of such tiny beings as we are 

asks to be filled; the need 

for the new love is faithfulness to the old. 

Wait. 

Don't go too early. 

You're tired. But everyone's tired. 

But no one is tired enough. 

Only wait a while and listen. 

Music of hair, 

Music of pain, 

music of looms weaving all our loves again. 

Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, 

most of all to hear, 

the flute of your whole existence, 

rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.