The figure alone is enough to keep me wide awake,
the five with its little stationmaster’s belly
and cap with a flat visor, followed by the zero,
oval of looking glass, porthole on a ghost ship,
an opening you stick your arm through and feel
nothing.
I want to daydream here in the dark, listening
to the trees behind the house reciting their poems,
bare anonymous beings, murmuring to themselves
in lines that reach out like long branches in spring.
I want my mind to be a sail, susceptible to any breeze
that might be blowing across the lake of consciousness.
But I keep picturing the number, round and daunting:
I drop a fifty dollar bill on a crowded street.
I carry a fifty pound bag of wet sand on my shoulders.
I see fifty years leaping a fence in a field, one by one.
I fan the five decades before me like a poker hand.
I try contemplating the sufferings of others, Rossini,
for example, considered by many to be the Father
of Modern Insomnia for his prolonged sleeplessness
during the composition of the William Tell Overture.
But even a long meditation on the life of Brahms,
recognized by all as the Father of the Modern Lullaby,
will not dispel the fives and zeros, gnomes in the night,
perched on the bedposts, one straddling a closet
doorknob.
By dawn, I have become a Catholic again,
the oldest altar boy in the parish, complete
with surplice and cassock, cruet, thurible and candle.
And this day, whose first light is gilding the windows,
has become another one of the sorrowful mysteries.
It follows the agony in the garden of childhood
and precedes the crucifixion of the words I write,
the letter X removed from the noun and nailed to a
cross.
The rest of the alphabet and I stand witness
on the rocky hillside, marvelling at all the lightning
that is cutting silently across the dark sky.
Leave a Reply