This is a second stab at this scenario: me, insomniac at a window imagining my fellow insomniacs awake with me, near me on a moonlit night. Only a few lines remain of the first take: Light in Other Windows. I’m not quite where I want to be with it be even yet.
Night Owls
A hazy half-moon hangs upon the wee hours,
a lone lamp beckoning at the edge of the village.
Everyone’s asleep but the sleepless, who gaze
out from dark rooms as late freights rumble by.
As for me, past my three-score-and-ten, I sleep
little and lightly, as if saving up for eternal rest.
But each inhabits a different village from each
as long as the rest of the village lies asleep.
One is wondering why the dead keep calling him,
why even in dreams he can’t be done with them.
Another wonders where she lost her way, if
the way things are is the way they will always be.
One studies his reflection in the window, as if he
were twins, one in darkness and one in the light.
In another a naked man smokes until a sleepy
murmur sounds and moon-pale flesh reaches out.
A calico cat blankets a windowsill, still but for her
blinking eyes which track mice in the moonlight.
A vet startled out of nightmare keeps moonlit watch,
cleans his sidearm, reassembles it by touch alone.
A pregnant woman moons out her kitchen window,
rubs her sore back, spoons ice cream from the carton.
And a bookish man stays up staring at a blank page,
clutching a fruitless pen beneath a stingy moon.
All these in just one square mile of night. Watching
over them, I feel I must leave some benediction:
“May the night train carry you to dreamless sleep;
may daybreak burn off what lurks in the deep.”
