Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight by Galway Kinnell
Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight
by Galway Kinnell
1
You scream, waking from a nightmare.
When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.
2
I have heard you tell
the sun, don't go down, I have stood by
as you told the flower, don't grow old,
don't die. Little Maud,
I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,
I would suck the rot from your fingernail,
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever,
until washerwomen
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,
and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades,
and rats walk away from the culture of the plague,
and iron twists weapons toward truth north,
and grease refuse to slide in the machinery of progress,
and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,
and the widow still whispers to the presence no longer beside her
in the dark.
And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,
this the nightmare you wake screaming from:
being forever
in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.
3
In a restaurant once, everyone
quietly eating, you clambered up
on my lap: to all
the mouthfuls rising toward
all the mouths, at the top of your voice
you cried
your one word, caca! caca! caca!
and each spoonful
stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering
steam.
Yes,
you cling because
I, like you, only sooner
than you, will go down
the path of vanished alphabets,
the roadlessness
to the other side of the darkness,
your arms
like the shoes left behind,
like the adjectives in the halting speech
of old folk,
which once could call up the lost nouns.
4
And you yourself,
some impossible Tuesday
in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out
among the black stones
of the field, in the rain,
and the stones saying
over their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît,
and the raindrops
hitting you on the fontanel
over and over, and you standing there
unable to let them in.
5
If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a café at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where wine takes the shapes of upward opening glasses,
and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be memory,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come—to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
that tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.
The still undanced cadence of vanishing.
6
In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes
the hand that waved once
in my father's eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:
and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.
7
Back you go, into your crib.
The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.
Your eyes close inside your head,
in sleep. Already
in your dreams the hours begin to sing.
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wages
of dying is love.
Kinnell wrote The Book of Nightmares in his early forties, when his children Maud and Fergus were small. The book is dedicated to them and addresses them directly across the ten poems — instructing them, holding them, mourning them in advance, teaching them that the world they have entered is one of mortal love. This came to me from an odd place, Michelle Williams citing it in an interview she did for Elle magazine. I was so struck by her description of herself, because in part it was something I felt such kinship with — the sense of being too raw, too hyperaware as a kid with the “presentiment of loss” which led to depression in my late teens and later. And always, always, the call for me to water.
"I'm always aware of the whole," Williams says. "I have that feeling inside, like when something really tickles or delights me—it's not singular. I recognize all the awful things in the world, and in spite of them, I can still laugh." This hyperawareness has come at a price. "For so long, I felt like a walking open wound everywhere I went," she says. "There's this Joan Didion quote about being afflicted from an early age with a presentiment of loss. Did I come into the world like that? Or was I kind of gifted that?"
“"I'm obsessed with water," Williams says. "The scene in Brokeback Mountain when I open the door and see Heath and Jake kiss? Everyone was outside and I was in this hallway by myself, and I just kept thinking, I want to be like water. I want to slip through fingers, but hold up a ship."
I think I’ll let her own words from the article speak about this Galway Kinnell poem in particular, because it simply says it all:
This reminds her of a favorite poem she discovered, "when I was, like, really skimming the bottom. I was in this hotel and I reached over into the bedside table for, I don't know what—a phone book, some matches, the Bible, something—and inside it was an old copy of The Paris Review. And the first poem was by this guy named Galway Kinnell. And I read it and I felt safe and understood by the world for the first time." So much so that she's become a Galway groupie, attending his readings. She even wrote him a letter. "There's this one poem called `Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight.' It's about being a parent—I loved it even before I had a kid—and the last lines are, `When I come back/ we will go out together,/ we will walk out together among/ the ten thousand things,/ each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wages/ of dying is love.'"
"For a long time the last line utterly mystified me. The wages of dying is love? Like, the price of dying is love? The cost? No. For dying you're paid in love. Because you have to die, you get to experience love. Finally decoded!"
