Here’s my thoughts from this week’s PE letter with accompanying poems. Sweet Dreams! 

I’ve been going through a period of enjoying good sleep. If you’ve ever been an insomniac (which I was earlier in life) or a restless/up-and-down type sleeper you know what torture it can be and how it starts to skew the daylight hours, making you grumpy and inattentive, with health issues starting to crop up in body, mind and spirit. You get the idea. Well, what a relief to have made it through the last couple of years where the hormones were jumping around like kangaroos on espresso, allowing for little or no chance for a peaceful and deep reverie at night. I would either be freezing cold and piling every blanket in the house on top of my shivering body or feeling like someone had dropped me in a vat of boiling water, like the proverbial lobster, flinging the just-moments-ago precious blankets off onto the floor, leaving not even a thin sheet to cover my steaming body.

It’s hard to say what changed the “climate” but these last couple of months I have rediscovered what it is to sleep through the night, with only an occasional trip to the bathroom or groggy awakening to check the clock and roll back over into dreamland. And, speaking of dreams, those too have been more fun and interesting, leaving less residue of angst and fear that I was going over the mental edge when I awoke, my eyes bolting open and calculating my best escape route from the creatures under the bed or rustling around out in the backyard. I’m not sure what affected the change—whether it was just the body running its course with the whole change-of-life thing or if all those vitamins, herbs, homeopathic remedies, acupuncture, massage, chiropractic and various healing modalities had finally reached their cumulative potency and kicked me through to a new zone – like restarting the computer when a program stalls and you’re not clear exactly why, but when you Ctr-Alt-Delete all is well again on your monitor screen, one of the many mysteries of this life that you just accept, unless you want to spend your lifetime researching and analyzing the why and the wherefore of such things.

I’m grateful, that’s all I can say, and honestly, take one day (or should I say night) at a time, not sure that the next time I lay my head down on the pillow I won’t wake an hour later in a cold sweat, desperately flailing about for those blankets that I so confidently stashed away in the closet down the hall.

SLEEPING ALONE

It should be easy, no one
   Else breathing beside you
And no restless turning
   Away and, look,
No hands or uneven feet
   In the wrong nightmare
And no murmuring heart
   Open or shut now, sighing
For you or yours but yours
   Alone this night, oblivion
Not yours for the asking
   Or begging, but the surprising
Glimmer of dawn, even there
   In that place somewhere
The other has gone to sleep
   Without you, not now
And then, but forever.

David Wagoner
Good Morning and Good Night
University of Illinois Press, Publishers

A BED FOR A WOMAN

I sat right up in bed and said, “Help.”
I didn’t scream it as if I were dreaming
a nightmare. I don’t know what I was dreaming.
The “Help” came from a dream core like the pulp
in the core of a tooth. I wasn’t frightened,
and that’s important since it took all my
energy and self-concern to understand why
I spoke in the darkness but wasn’t frightened.
I rose up out of bed like a person
whose fever had broken as this person
had known it would. Desperation,
hysterical shapelessness, was not in the word
as it would have been had I called, but I spoke.
“Help” was more like an answer. When I woke,
but not immediately, for I was too startled, I smiled
in this bed for a woman, far from the crib of a child.

Molly Peacock
Cornucopia
W.W. Norton & Co., Publishers