Sleepless Elegy
By Joel Long
for Mackay
Since you’ve gone, I’ve watched rerun clips
of SNL, Norm McDonald as Burt Reynolds on Jeopardy,
young Will Ferrell bland as Trebek—I laughed, maybe,
as I lay in bed in the middle of the night, insomnia
brought on the dogs, by death, how it hides you, now
and where, with what actual silence and dark.
I’ve listened to the radio, driving to school, first
days of the year, heard reports about sweat, how sweat
does not smell, how bacteria on skin mixed with sweat
smells, how we sweat when we sleep because we want
to sleep cool. I am sweating at night, but I don’t think
it helps—the body, the body—does not help me sleep.
And then I begin to think of you; I don’t sleep so well. I scroll
on my phone to watch shock jock Howard Stern ask David Spade
about Norm McDonald, who no one knew was sick and then
he was dead, Norm, so funny, meandering jokes, the moth,
his battle-axe wife. In the automatic scroll, Joni Mitchell ,
20-years-old, sings a folk song in black and white.
Some dandy stands beside her and strums, looks at her,
a miracle in bangs sprung from the lake near Saskatoon.
He feels diminished with every note she sings. I wake
still tired, eat Cheerios with milk, some cantaloupe
I need to eat before it turns. The retriever rests his damp snout
on my knee, and five hummingbirds hover around
the feeder while I eat. They startle me from my breakfast.
I can’t get enough of what you left behind, all this light,
all these people singing, telling jokes and stories all night
when I cannot sleep, since you’ve been gone. I will not
see you again. And the radio tells me the price of gas
is down; a teenager flew around the world in a plane.
—
About Author
Joel Long’s book Winged Insects won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Lessons in Disappearance (2012) and Knowing Time by Light (2010) were published by Blaine Creek Press. His chapbooks, Chopin’s Preludes and Saffron Beneath Every Frost were published from Elik Press. His poems and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Sports Literate, Prairie Schooner, Bellingham Review, Rhino, Bitter Oleander, Massachusetts Review, Terrain, and Water-Stone Review, among others. He lives in Salt Lake City.