Glorious Sleep, At Last!

Sleep

I love to go to sleep,
When bed takes me like a lover
wrapping my limbs in
cool linen, soothing
the fretfulness
of day glaring like
the Cyclops' eye
in a forehead
of furrows.

But I wake
always reluctantly, brushing
the dreamcrumbs
from my lids,
walking sideways underwater
like a crab
spilling coffee,
knocking the mug
to the floor
where it shatters
in a muddy river
to my continuo of
"Shit, shit, shit!"

What if death
is only a forgetting
to wake in the morning,
a dream that goes on
into other corridors,
other chambers
draped with other silks,
libraries of unwritten books
whose caleidoscopic pages
can be read
only by the pinneal eye,
music that can only be heard
by the seventh sense
or the eighth or ninth,
until we possess
an infinity of senses--
none of them
dependent on flesh?

What if our love of sleep
is only a foretaste
of the bliss that awaits us
when we do not have to wake again?

What frightens us so
about falling?
To drop the body and fly
should be as natural
as drifting into a dream.
But we are insomniacs
tossing on soaked sheets,
hanging on
to our intricate pain
while God with her sweet
Mona Lisa smile
sings lullabyes
the ears of the living
cannot hear.

Poem by Erica Jong