Photo by William Stafford, Oswego, New York, 1969.
Doctors call it having a “sleeping disorder” when one has insomnia, but in fact it is always night when the brain is most active, whether asleep or awake. Even if one isn’t a writer poring over words on a piece of paper, inventing fables, trapping myths, shooting griffons and unicorns with a sharp pen, one’s brain is doing the same thing though we don’t remember what it is we have dreamed. I think that a large part of the difference between a writer and one who does other things is that the writer somehow remembers at least scraps of what he or she dreams. On the other hand, however, perhaps
If I were you, I wouldn't listen
to me. If I stood there in your shoes,
staring at this graying man writing
in an attic late at night, a motor snoring
and music trickling from speakers
to seep through a sleeping house,
I would turn away, thinking of dreams
I have had, wondering if I'd have more
someday, some night, some winter morning,
the blue of the lake dripping out of its ice, wind
sniffing at the window. But spring
will have come by then. If you
were I you would be grateful. You'd say,
“Listen to that nib scratching, the grass
struggling up through drifts of sleep, these words
forming themselves as though they meant something to me.”
You would say, “Over the chimney
of this house night is lifting
beneath the wings of geese returning
to their old haunts.” And I would reply,
“They have never been away. All is
as it was, as it will always be.” Then, shaking
your head, you would turn your back, you
would leave me here just as I
would leave you, if I were you walking
down the stairs, yellow light cascading
out of the ceiling, along the eaves,
into the rooms full of sleeping people whose love
will wash through our dreams of waking
when we shall lie down at last.
Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem "Conceit."
The poem “Conceit” first appeared in VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, Vol. I, No. i, Spring 1990. It was first collected in The Shifting Web: New and Selected Poems, Fayettefulle: University of Arkansas Press, 1989, and later in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press.com, © 2007 by Lewis Turco. The poem and essay together, by the same author, appear in La Famiglia: The Family, Memoirs, New York: Bordighera Press, 2009. All rights reserved.
Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM
La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, New York: Bordighera Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00. ORDER FROM AMAZON
