b a r b a r a  f l e t c h e r: other poems


Asleep

I want to write a letter to my narcoleptic muse,
asleep under thick and warm duvets,
on rattling streetcars along Queen Street,
beside the pier where silver-blue ice fissures and flows
as one continuous frozen wave.

I want to write and find out how she's doing,
how she's getting along without me.
But she would never get to the end of the note
without slipping into sleep,
without laying to rest all of those beautiful
and necessary words,
without closing her eyes and drifting into
a void where nothing can reach her:
in the cold, unreachable hyperlimnion of sleep.