April 11, 2005: Sleep Positions, Lola Haskins
Sleep Positions
Lola Haskins
This is how we sleep:
On our backs, with pillows covering our chests, heavy as dirt
On our sides, like wistful spoons
Clenched, knees in-tucked, arms folded
Wide, like sprawling-rooted lotuses
In Iowa on top of pictures of Hawaii, huge white flowers on blue
In New York on black satin
In China on straw.
This is how our dreams arrive:
As hot yellow taxicabs;
As sudden blazing steam, we who have been pots on a stove,
looking only at our own lids;
As uninvited insects, all at once on our tongues.
O hairdresser, auditor, hardknuckled puller of crabtraps, you who
think poetry was school, you who believe you never had
a flying thought,
lie down.
[What can I say? There’s a reason this bumped its way in front of all
the poems I knew before I started this project. I just want to read it
over and over. There should be more poetry about sleep, and dreams. So
very strange and perpetually interesting. I also really love that this
is first person plural — I am hungry for more “we” poems, which you
should share if you know any. Before this one of my favorite examples
was Uchepas, also by Lola Haskins]
More like this:
— Variations on the Word Sleep, by Margaret Atwood
— The First Dream, by Billy Collins
— Grass, by Lola Haskins
