WILLIAM LOGAN

Debora sleeping

The ferry window frames a pop-art shovel, jaw drooling gouts of water and harbor mud. The drawn-in gangplank scrapes against the wood. A few shy children pelt the boat with gravel,

but the stones fall short. The boat’s an oven. Outside the seagulls circle, lazy and overweight, crying against decisions of the state like winged burghers stacked up outside heaven.

The French and Spanish ports decline midway between bureaucracy and art, but while waiting for the Fifties to return to style they condescend to watch our nights and days.

You‘re asleep again, as on the leaf-lit train, though here a purple plastic chair’s your bed. The pre-Raphaelitic curls that wreathe your head are permanent - at least, immune to rain,

unlike the satin shirt I made you wear in Paris, that did not outlast the storm. You spent the evening huddling to keep warm and whispered phrasebook curses in my ear.

Sleep’s our disease, the heart‘s adagio. We wallow in its sty, refuse to leave the rundown precinct of its raveled sleeve, the only ease bodies so close can know.

Or so I thought. Watching you here sleep in hard daylight - hulled on that dream beach, drugged (courtesy Dramamine), silent, out of reach - I know the first stirring of a distant fear.

The boat wakes toward chalk cliffs closed by fog where fishermen not out of work still bear the dying and disputed catch ashore. Sleep by other means continues dialogue.