Then in the mornings, once I’d been good and earned my
reading-rights by getting up for breakfast, washing myself and doing a
house-work job like dusting with an old singlet of Dad’s, I’d be allowed to go
back to my room, to sleep-read, which is possibly the most delicious sensation
I know—pages are read, face drops onto arm or pillow, wake, read more, drop off
dreaming the next part of the story…
I don’t sleep like that now, not with that heavy sense of ease
and rightfulness. These days I doubt
sleep, and perhaps knowing this sleep in turn is skittish with me, thin like
the meanness of dieting, jumpy like a new love, uncertain and fleet of foot.
And yet, and yet… my body gets tired but I love what night-wakefulness
can do If I let it. There is no fight
sometimes against 3am, no fight and no hope-for-sleep and no anything so
sometimes I simply mediate a huge blue flower across the dark expanse of my forehead. Sometimes I get up from the kicked sheets and
beaten pillow, and these times are sublime.
There is the night being washed. Who is
doing this washing, how does it happen always this way? The utter clarity in the chill air, my toes scrunching
on the warmer greyed-wood of the deck, and the possums have stilled in my
presence. Night-flower-scent, delicate,
moreso than under the sun of daytime. Jasmine
and honeysuckle and the gorgeous sexiness of orange roses.
Or 5am, my mind yearning towards coffee and the sharpening
into day, perhaps I do some words or read.
I go again to the back veranda to sail in a brief dream-burst upon tiny
wooden boats silhouetted on a sky that is striated pink-- a mobile that takes me
briefly into fantasies of the spice isles, where I lurch against rigging as my
grin splits my face in two and my lips catch salt-spume.
Eventually, in insomnia, I wonder why I would sleep when
there are waking dreams?
