Levitating Instead of Sleeping

Levitating Instead of Sleeping



I’m lying in bed
levitating instead of sleeping
which is how my body refuses
to sink into these soft pillows
and cotton sheets

and I’m thinking about Jackson & Cooper
cat & cockatiel, and how Jackson
lies on top of Cooper’s cage
and the normally chatty
and chirpy Cooper gets very quiet

and I’m thinking
about water, which is perfectly
obedient to gravity, the way it seeks
the lowest place and goes there
always, until there’s no room for itself
so many ways to fall
without question or answer

and how yesterday
with quiet compliance
a woman bent over my feet
to give me a pedicure
buffed my nails, painted a mini
sunny-sky landscape on my toes

and about how maybe,
maybe I can bear to live without love inhaled
in the middle of the night
and I’m Jackson&Cooper&Water

and I’m Michelangelo’s angel
with shiny toenails painted all wrong
but exactly right: sun below, flower on top
and a river in the sky

but I can’t stay up here much longer
listening to him chip away
at my black sky knowing that at any moment
it could all shatter.

published in Juniper, 2006