20
Sleep is 20
remembering the
insignificant flamenco dancer
in Granada
who became
important as you watched
the mountain ridge
the dry hills
What an idiotic number!
Sleep is twenty
it certainly isn’t twenty sheep
there weren’t that many in the herd
under the cold crest of Sierra Nevada
It’s more like 20 Madison Ave. buses
while I go droning away at my dream life
Each episode is important
that’s what it is! Sequences —
I’ve got going a twenty-act drama
the theatre of the active
the critics are surely there
even the actors
even the flowers presented onstage
even the wild flowers
picked by the wife of the goatherd
each morning early (while I sleep)
under the snow cone
of Sierra Nevada
yellow caps like castanets
I reach into my bouquet
half-dreaming
and count twenty
yellow capped heads
flowers clicking twenty times
because they like to repeat themselves
as I do as does the morning
or the drama one hopes
will be acted many times
As even these dreams in similar
people’s heads
20
castanets
Copyright Credit: Barbara Guest, “20” from The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest. Copyright © 2008 by Barbara Guest and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source: The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan University Press, 2008)