In Search of Rest

Five Breaks
Margaret Avison

        I

Top-spun, swiftly
paid out,
you flung me, dancing, humming:
      'Joy it is
      to ride the day,
      lest that one toy with
      God's play.'
The stranger motif here
stunned my now dizzying ear,
and stilled, I lay
toppled and listening.


       II

No one at slack but
jerking guy-ropes or (Look out!)
lash-tackle will
entangle.
Rope-burned, wind-sifted,
praising the Stranger courage and
barrenlands beauty,
strong in your buffeting, I
stood, speed-blind, among
your synchronizing glories.


       III

O, then, a careful face
shone bare. In your
held breath, new pinpointed - 
were they besiegers' eye-prongs circling
as though a City's famine could be succulence?
I swellingly knew
the aliens, close: all the
my-mind versions of your glory
(like seeing death life, as your
memoranda left on the blotter
for my day's work; like 
chronologies - of 'mercies' - these,
these, as if exacted; like
feeling the flesh as tomb
stoned by its own
funereal pieties,
braced for rotting geologies of endurance - 
and after that for grubbing,
engine-heat, the
firebird cycle...)


       IV

Valentine cards
in the February lace of daylight
through window and doorway glass:
store; children; love; a lakeblue sudsbright
eleven o'clock outdoors, seen too
by the scorched eyes of grief,
the gravelled eyes of
utter disappointment, these
zero in the 
arrowing sunburst, cone-tip, the
transfixing life.


       V

Your tireless rise, your daybreak,
O, here, touch home.


I wrote not long ago about how I haven't been sleeping well. I have discovered one thing that helps though: poetry. If I crawl into bed with a book of poetry and delve into it, just allowing myself to soak in it, I can actually feel myself physically relax. Some of the tension drains from my shoulders, my thoughts stop spinning in obsessive, downward spirals, I breathe a little bit deeper and, after a while, I can actually sleep. Sadly this does nothing for the length of my sleep since I have to stay up to do the reading, but it has helped the quality of my sleep. And more than that, it is helping me feel sane. A small miracle if you ask me.