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The Sleepers
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
8 The Sleepers And in the dimness of the corridor, a waking person steps soundlessly through the rows of unseen sleepers, each in his individual box behind a wall. Another treads elsewhere, a parallel corridor, a carpet of deep maroon absorbing the weight of the step, the sound of the step, as if no one— The gray wears a gray scarf, knitted, about its throat, or seeps from itself, evaporating into gray, a mist, heapings of insulation, the itch of material, gray swathe, stiff canvas of Ālament—and above, outside the hallways (rectangular prisms of gray) (two telescopes of gray capped on either end): the dull stars stuck over the earth like buttons in a dust upholstery. And sing soft to one another, and the bodies follow from offstage, from behind the heavy plush, where the ropes are held and the hands dressed in black flit between the long, thin planes of scenery— On the path we saw a tanager like an orange handkerchief pulled through the leaves. There is always that distant tremolo in the air that rises from the green, from the graves in the dell, and the kingĀsher diving over the membrane of pond. And above all the tangle (the matted earth, the root hairs and vascular bundles, the barky breachings of gnarl, the bullfrogs and the gnat-clouds, 9 the squirrels growing fatter, and then the panoplies of leaves-on-leaves like a game of stacking hands, or canopies where the branches arch in ribs), above: the spots of chimney sparrows flitting like eye motes over the white of the sky. The rattle of the sparrows like a handful of dice or dried beans thrown into a toy drum (the sound of the rattle like a hemisphere of straight pins radiating from their cushion, the pin heads balancing each its million spots of light, allotted, while beneath and down to the sharpened tip, the long metal shafts vibrate invisibly: sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Your separate sleeps— ) ...