Reset Forty-Nine, Day One Hundred-Sixteen

[rejectomorph]

Sitting here this wasting away Sunday morning not remembering what became of Saturday, knowing only that the aches and emptiness of that night led me to sleep long though not well, and that this early morning's dark did not feel like a new day but like some ancient time displaced and wandering aimlessly, I, dazed, watch a tissue's white translucence risen above its box flutter like something alive, or as alive as me, moved, unlike me, by the fan's draft while I feel only the evaporative coolness on my skin of the air's ancient passage.

Still tired, of course, though now nerve-fueled by coffee, I feel as though I'm waiting for something not like a bus, unscheduled, unplanned, uncalled for, but inevitable. The things that ached remain mostly as they were, more condition than event, and for now unconcealed. It occurs to me that I should probably take a shower before the day grows warmer. The mundane is such a comforting distraction from the void. Physically unmoved yet something in me does still flutter like that tissue that seems to aspire to fly. Such things have always done such things and always will as long as they are.




Sunday Verse

How to Sleep

by Dorianne Laux


Let your mountainous forehead
with its veins of bright ore
ease down, the deep line
between your brows flatten,
unruffle the small muscles
below your temples, above
your jaws, let the grimace
muscles in your cheekbones
go, the weeping muscles
sealing your eyes. Die into
the pillow, calm in the knowledge
that you will someday cease, soon
or late, late or soon, the song
you're made of will stop, your body
played out, the currents pulsing
through your brain drained
of their power, their purpose,
will frizzle out through
your fingertips, private sparks
leaping weakly onto the sheets
where you lay breathing
and then not breathing.
Lay your head down and relax
into it: death. Accept it.
Trick yourself like this.
Hover in a veil of ethers.
Call it sleep.