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Snake Skins, Kate Boston-Williams
Hybriddreich, 2021 £4.00
Truth or dare
It’s true that, as someone who suffers from insomnia, I have no trouble whatsoever empathising with the narrator of ‘Night Mountain’. Nor any trouble whatsoever in feeling sympathy for her:
She’s always prepared —
cool pillows stacked like icebergs,
lavender scented drapery and
a warm cup of sweet milk.
It’s true I don’t know her name, her age or anything about her except she desperately wants and needs to sleep — but she can’t. It’s true that, like her, I know the experience of sleep being close but elusive:
She feels it coming,
a creeping shadow
straining her skin,
creaking behind the curtain —
a wall of black granite.
It’s 2.00 am as I write this, with the wind howling outside. If I go and look in the mirror, I will see the poet in her nightdress, see her ‘coal-hole eyes.’ Her arms are ‘bare’, and she asks: ‘How do they do it? / The others?’
Of course, I’m just as interested as she is in the ‘how’ of the first question. How do other people manage to sleep, these people the narrator has seen, ‘their faces / smudged with a beautiful kind of death’?
But, to tell the truth, it’s the question-mark after ‘others’ that’s keeping me awake tonight. Who are these others? Where are they? Were they born with some intrinsic quality I lack? Or do they live in a way that bestows on them a quality I should be seeking to acquire? Do they live in places where sleep is easier to find?
Perhaps I am all too like the narrator — who
clings to the rock,
listens to the humming silence
daring her to fall,
trust the blissful unknown
until, at such time
she will reach out to touch
the summit of the morning.
Sue Butler