Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

American Insomnia

G W E N E B E RT American Insomnia There will be no dogs in heaven barking at night. There will be no night, for which I am grateful, and no sleep, which makes this moment almost heavenly. It’s a way of looking at things, say, L.A.—or the empty car being towed in the other lane and how lonely it is without the usual head at the wheel. On airport escalators we seem so American, looking at each other and looking for evidence of what we are or should be. No one tells. No one claims their solo version of humanity. No one invites the others in to rest on the beaten sofa. We will not tease each other as if we were alike in embarrassing ways. It’s not a joking matter, the weight, the divorce, how we sit at the feet of Madison Avenue and ask the television over and over if this is being alive, or is that, and will you play it for us again in another set and wardrobe? Can we believe the crowd of voices in the living room, bringing their drama and their cool? Saturday night the saxophone crawls like a snake, smooth as cappuccino in Manhattan. We can almost believe we are having a good time. We can almost believe Talk Radio as a kind of neighborhood. Pieces of family are left like derelict farm machinery in the stodgy states. Our deli food comes ready made in take out trays for one. And one and one, everywhere, America in its choice, does not know what to wear, when to laugh, how to love, how long. Awkward as a digital clock—a money machine, angry as traffic we are strung together by the high voltage buzz of our need. It’s on 24 hours a day, tireless as a glacier. By strip malls and video stores it has eaten the landscape as a snack. Now we cannot sleep. The old wilderness is gone and a new one howls at night, 242 ❚ The 1990s worse without predators and silence, without mystery and soul— more immense, more lonely, more inexhaustible. The 1990s ❚ 243 ...