The long vigil of insomnia, so suffused with tenderness for those who sleep, as though the house were a ship one could captain through the thousand secret terrors of the dark,the house adrift like the Mary Celeste : compressor hum of the fridge, some small scrambling, timbers settling in the attic, a threnody of summer insects and nightbirds, the whine of train brakes in the distance. The dark laps at the house, and crashes in overgrown apple wood branches against it, like sea foam, like a stormcloud, like the end of all things.
© Jacob Rakovan