The Book of Sleep
                                    (West Mt. Airy)

In the kitchen, you lay down your crowbar,
breathe in the dust
of someone's asbestos-choked childhood.
Clouds wander in the hole
where the window used to be.

On Germantown Ave., the goatherd
leads his flock past the pizza place
and video store. Hurried neither
by the honking cars, nor by the threat of snow.

                                    In time, all creatures
should be hid under the cloud of forgetting

                          And thus sleep, so long
deferred, guts us, takes down the parting walls.

Copyright © 2008 Eleanor Stanford All rights reserved
from The Book of Sleep
Carnegie Mellon University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission