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In the town where I was born lived a woman and her daughter, who walked in their sleep. One night, while silence enfolded the world, the woman and her daughter, walking, yet asleep, met in their mist-veiled garden. And the mother spoke, and she said:  “At last, at last, my enemy! You by whom my youth was destroyed—who have built up your life upon the ruins of mine!  Would I could kill you!” And the daughter spoke, and she said:  “O hateful woman, selfish and old!  Who stand between my freer self and me!  Who would have my life an echo of your own faded life!  Would you were dead!” At that moment a cock crew, and both women awoke.  The mother said gently, “Is that you, darling?”  And the daughter answered gently, “Yes, dear.”

A sleeper , they used to call it— four passes with the giant round saw and you had a crosstie, 7 inches by 9 of white oak— at two hundred pounds nearly twice my weight and ready to break finger or toe— like coffin lids, those leftover slabs, their new-sawn faces turning gold and brown as my own in the hot Virginia sun, drying toward the winter and the woodsaw and on the day of that chore I turned over a good, thick one looking for the balance point and roused a three-foot copperhead, gold and brown like the wood, disdaining the shoe it muscled across, each rib distinct as a needle stitching leather, heavy on my foot as a crosstie.

Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote. Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses. Homer nodded and occasionally slept during the greater part of the Iliad; he was awake however when he wrote the Odyssey. Proust snored his way through The Captive, as have legions of his readers after him. Melville was asleep at the wheel for much of Moby-Dick. Fitzgerald slept through Tender Is the Night, which is perhaps not so surprising, but the fact that Mann slumbered on the very slopes of The Magic Mountain is quite extraordinary—that he wrote it, even more so. Kafka, of course, never slept, even while not writing or on bank holidays. No one knows too much about George Eliot’s writing habits—my guess is she would sleep a few minutes, wake up and write something, then pop back to sleep again. Lew Wallace’s forty winks came, incredibly, during the chariot race in Ben-Hur. Emily Dickinson slept on her cold, narrow bed in Amherst. When she awoke there would be a new poem inscribed by Jack Frost on the windowpane; outside, glass foliage chimed. Good old Walt snored as he wrote and, like so many of us, insisted he didn’t. Maugham snored on the Riviera. Agatha Christie slept daintily, as a woman sleeps, which is why her novels are like tea sandwiches—artistic, for the most part. I sleep when I cannot avoid it; my writing and sleeping are constantly improving. I have other things to say, but shall not detain you much. Never go out in a boat with an author—they cannot tell when they are over water. Birds make poor role models. A philosopher should be shown the door, but don’t, under any circumstances, try it. Slaves make good servants. Brushing the teeth may not always improve the appearance. Store clean rags in old pillow cases. Feed a dog only when he barks. Flush tea leaves down the toilet, coffee grounds down the sink. Beware of anonymous letters—you may have written them, in a wordless implosion of sleep.

I live with the small shame of not knowing the multiple names for blue to describe the nightsky over New Mexico to describe the light in my lover’s eyes. It is a small shame that grows. I live with the small shame which resides in the absences of my speech as I pause to search for the word in Spanish to translate a poem to my Father who sits there waiting who scans my eyes to see what I cannot fully describe who waits for the word from me the word that escapes me in the moment the word I fear has never resided within me. It is a small shame that grows when indigo and cerulean are merely azul and not añil and cerúleo.

Clouds thin into form: a hawk pulling a tail of rings—beads of an abacus, the mathematics of light—a lengthening spine, snakeskin no longer inhabited. All day I'm giving a name for what isn't there. Yet somewhere we've left our likeness, the hollow shapes of us. Even though the snake has slipped into the shade, the shed skin, deceptively whole, hidden in the sun-flecked grass, remembers what it once held.

In case you sit across from the meteorologist tonight, and in case the dim light over the booth in the bar still shines almost planetary on your large, smooth, winter-softened forehead, in case all of the day—its woods and play, its fire— has stayed on your beard, and will stay through the slight drift of mouth, the slackening of even your heart's muscle— . . . well. I am filled with snow. There's nothing to do now but wait.

I Throughout the afternoon I watched them there, Snow-fairies falling, falling from the sky, Whirling fantastic in the misty air, Contending fierce for space supremacy. And they flew down a mightier force at night, As though in heaven there was revolt and riot, And they, frail things had taken panic flight Down to the calm earth seeking peace and quiet. I went to bed and rose at early dawn To see them huddled together in a heap, Each merged into the other upon the lawn, Worn out by the sharp struggle, fast asleep. The sun shone brightly on them half the day, By night they stealthily had stol’n away. II And suddenly my thoughts then turned to you Who came to me upon a winter’s night, When snow-sprites round my attic window flew, Your hair disheveled, eyes aglow with light. My heart was like the weather when you came, The wanton winds were blowing loud and long; But you, with joy and passion all aflame, You danced and sang a lilting summer song. I made room for you in my little bed, Took covers from the closet fresh and warm, A downful pillow for your scented head, And lay down with you resting in my arm. You went with Dawn. You left me ere the day, The lonely actor of a dreamy play.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden's end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm. Come see the north wind's masonry. Out of an unseen quarry evermore Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer Curves his white bastions with projected roof Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he For number or proportion. Mockingly, On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths; A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn; Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall, Maugre the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate, A tapering turret overtops the work. And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work, The frolic architecture of the snow.

For once, I felt wanted, dead or alive, the day my fame outgrew the Famous Five. There came a time I could give no more to the other guys in the Gang of Four and I felt the dead weight fall from me when I unyoked the clowns of the Crucial Three. I considered all this as I boarded the bus to quit the town not big enough for both of us. One eye didn’t seem so much to leave behind as I sped to my job in the kingdom of the blind.

To be free of situations, To live from day to day without events And to be free from the need to narrate them. One small detail, the blossoming crab apple, For example, on the lengthening boulevard Of the stanza, this very one, That parallels the perturbation of the waves Mid-April—the Mississippi flowing above the locks Of Minneapolis, once called St. Anthony— Two blocks away, the river high with snowmelt, And where this morning I heard the call Of what I took to be a sparrow, white-throated, The leap of a minor third Two octaves above middle C. Four birds outside this afternoon. Four distinct calls In a dispirited late daylight. And you? “You”? Waiting to experience a moment That has no precedent. The wish to be a child, Or the wish to be outside of time, The craving, that is, for a kind of death In which one stays somehow alert... Listening to the Schumann Violin Concerto: Written in that last period as he descended into the madness Brought on by syphilis when he heard the singing Of the angels, this piece was thought to be unplayable Until the metronome markings were ignored; In the second movement a brief passage comes and goes Like the frenzied clustering of bees, pure monotony, Like madness gathering its forces. Clara, Schumann’s wife, Asked that the piece never be performed, but one musician Said of his music that all madness contains a kind Of vulgarity, but even after he went insane, Schumann’s music retained that odd nobility. Outside, sounds of traffic, a woman’s cry from down the street. Idea for a frightening story: Last week I heard a scream so distant that it Had lost its call-to-rescue and its horror—dim vehemence, Like an auto accident seen from a train, The blood grown small, and the outcries As soundless as a branch in wind, Or like a child in snow straggling behind his parents, The drifts so deep he has trouble making headway, Being five years old, and so he calls out to them, “Hold!” because he cannot think of the proper word— Probably “Wait” or “Stop,”—and when they hear Him begging them to slow down and to wait for him, They turn around to laugh. Their laughter makes the child Sad and enraged, so he stops to cry, Whereupon his parents, still amused, bring out a camera To snap a picture of him as he wails. He understands that his unhappiness Was a diversion to them both, that they were bored By children and therefore found him comical, So there they are, laughing with delight. Today, sixty years later, he is Photographed, bundled in his winter coat. Oh, and the bored laughter, behind the camera, And the impossibility, the inconsequence Of any sympathy.