My Virtual Reading Room

Sleep is a maker of makers. Birds sleep. Feet cling
to a perch. Look at the balance. Let the legs loosen,
the backbone untwist, the head go heavy over, the
whole works tumbles a done bird off the perch.

Fox cubs sleep. The pointed head curls round into
hind legs and tail. It is a ball of red hair. It is a muff
waiting. A wind might whisk it in the air across
pastures and rivers, a cocoon, a pod of seeds. The
snooze of the black nose is in a circle of red hair.

Old men sleep. In chimney corners, in rocking chairs,
at wood stoves, steam radiators. They talk and forget
and nod and are out of talk with closed eyes. Forgetting
to live. Knowing the time has come useless for them to
live. Old eagles and old dogs run and fly in the dreams.

Babies sleep. In flannels the papoose faces, the bambino
noses, and dodo, dodo the song of many matushkas.
Babies--a leaf on a tree in the spring sun. A nub of a
new thing sucks the sap of a tree in the sun, yes, a new
thing, a what-is-it? A left hand stirs, an eyelid twitches,
the milk in the belly bubbles and gets to be blood and
a left hand and an eyelid. Sleep is a maker of makers.

From Smoke & Steel (Harcourt, Brace and How, Inc., 1920)
This poem is in the public domain.