by Lana Hechtman Ayers.
after “Venetian Siesta” by Joseph Millar
I’ve never had a talent for sleep but when I do,
it’s all dreams of lost rooms, rainstorms
of rotten teeth water-falling from my mouth,
still, I glissade through days wearing
calm façades while inside my mind
conducts a swing-shift sardine cannery,
and in this adrift late light of November,
I’m writing a letter to death,
composing and counting backwards
as if I were Joseph Millar stringing lines
across telephone poles or waiting at dusk
in a train depot for his beloved holding
the damp green skin of night, counting earlier
to when I was Neruda, casting my sad nets
over inky ocean waves, rose of salt, topaz,
yet all I have ever really been is bone
tired, caffeine jolted, slumber deprived, love
worn but doggedly happy because the world
gives us crows, rows of sweet corn, thunder
cracks pierced with lightning, Springsteen’s
“Thunder Road,” Van Gogh’s The Starry Night,
Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and saxophones,
O! any Chagall, blues flowing into violet,
violins, chickens, and poem after poem
that changes the world, one reader, one listener
at a time, binds us all together in this family
of cosmos, each of us dust and blood, moon
and microbes, fireflies, fungi, sun whales,
cat’s tails, and the cries that begin our lives
and the tears that end them.