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Last Sleep Best Sleep

Brenda Shaughnessy, 1970

Life, this charade of not-death.Amnesiac of our nights together,

overheard talking in some other voice.The great fruits of my failure:

silk milk pills with little bitter pits.Who talks like that !ays we are

ever-locked, leaving everything petalled and veined the way nature

pretended. !ynthesi"ed withinan inch of its life. # the many faces

of facelessness, breathing in the dark$ as if we could shape softness itself,

mold it around us like yams mashed

against a trough by a snuffling snout.

#ur own. There%s no way out. &ornto such e'tra, we are born to lose.

(o hairy fingers tapering to threads,grasping for some lost last use.

#nce we were hungry on earth,soon buried like root vegetables$

to starve the soil as beets do,growing in our graves.

&ut now we must remember our way back to face-to-face,

to eye to eye and hand in hand,and lock and step and key in hole.

)emembering how not to fall asleep,

we become so desperately drowsy,

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and all cells strain to slow to a stop.All desire to choose otherwise *uiets.

(o, no one can say we didn%t suffer,that we weren%t swallowed whole.