Hello! You may notice that I’ve switched platforms. My old provider was dumping my infrequent notes in people’s spam boxes. Thanks for following along.
Some news in my life, if we haven’t been personally in touch: I had a baby, a little son called Everett, almost two months ago. This means lots of couch time, lots of time soothing a grumbling little potato who needs something from me 90% of the day (conservative estimate). And like all small babies, he often has trouble sleeping; this week has been particularly rough, so now I’m replacing lost sleep with the energy I gain from peanut butter cups and wishing someone would invent a caffeinated mist I could squirt directly into my eyes.
Meanwhile, he lies in my lap, wrapped in his sister’s astronaut blanket, a big bald spot in his sweet hair from where it rubs against the cushion I use to prop him up. He lets out a sigh; his breath is even and deep and smells like yogurt. The tight fist of my own heart relaxes just for a moment. He will wake up soon, because he is eight weeks old and huge and hates contact naps now. But I take the fifteen minutes, because I like to look at his sleeping face. His mouth makes a shape that someone in my mommy chat described as an “Arby’s hat.” It’s worth the chaos.
The definition-of-insanity feeling of new parenthood led me to revisit one of my favorite books, Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell. Revisiting something you already know is a good reading strategy when you find yourself unable to think! I recommend this move. Anyway, Kinnell, who died in 2014, was a poet and a WW2 veteran, and, later, an outspoken antiwar activist. This book, which came out in 1971, is about the horrors of war as well as about love and new fatherhood, and about acknowledging that there is indeed a nightmare realm in both. It’s a book-long poem, and the section that most reliably makes me contemplate my life is “Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight.” Let’s look at it now, because I feel like hurting my own feelings.
I have yet to investigate the etymology of the term “sleeps-head” but this Kinnell-ism contains a dual set of references that I feel in my bones: the sleepyhead, a term of endearment for someone, perhaps a small child, adorable in their tiredness; and the death’s head, the skull, the shortest of shorthands for mortality itself. This is the book’s neat metaphor. War is obviously about confronting death, but what is having children? It’s certainly no opposite of war – death is inherent in the gore of childbirth, in the violence of opening a portal into this world. I should know; I recently spent the weeks leading up to Everett’s birth trying to make peace with the fact that one of us could die. There was nothing wrong with us, but I have to do this, now. I did it with Clara too. But even without trauma in your history, even if you don’t acknowledge it, death lives in the act of having children. It lives in the action of responding to one’s desire to participate in human continuity. Only a child who doesn’t exist can’t die. But life goes on – the sleep’s-head, unlike the skull, is sprouting.
The little noggin in the poem belongs to the narrator Kinnell’s small daughter Maud, who awakens from a nightmare. The poem begins when he picks her up; at that moment he is a damaged person full of love. This is Kinnell’s poetry.
[...] I think you think I will never die, I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars, even as my broken arms heal themselves around you.
The awareness of death is here in the action of scooping up the child. But love and resolve are there too. One of the things I like best about this book is that it doesn’t believe, in the ethos of its poetry, that time can heal a person’s trauma. Instead it illustrates living with your darknesses, like broken arms over time, the bones set a little wrong but still doing their function and even capable of tenderness.
The poem veers into the epic lyric: Kinnell makes many mentions of infinity, of the end of time, when detailing how far he would go for Maud.
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body, I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood, I would let nothing of you go, ever [...]
He would do this until “rats walk away from the culture of the plague.” But, he concedes, “perhaps this is the reason you cry.” Her nightmare comes from being always at the edge of timelessness, of the end of existence, that comes implied with life itself: “the pre-trembling of a house that falls.”
His narrator continues thinking relentlessly of death; inevitable perishing is there in every thought. The babbling syllables of a baby yelling about her soiled diaper in a restaurant become, in the next stanza, repeating words etched into hundreds of tombstones. The skull of the sleep’s-head grows; the fontanel closes like a sealed passageway. Underneath the kissed face of a beloved is an almost imperceptible skeleton, and “under the laughter / the wind crying across the black stones.” There are “temple bones,” with their dual meaning.
All of this goes through the narrator’s head as he cuddles his toddler daughter to soothe her. And back she goes in her crib at the end of the poem, and then there’s Kinnell at his most succinct, the thesis of the book, maybe of all his work:
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight, when I come back we will go out together, we will walk out together among the ten thousand things, each scratched in time with such knowledge, the wages of dying is love.
A reference to a similar biblical quote about death being the wages for sin, but this time, death is doing the earning. We have to do the job of dying, but our compensation is in these moments: our loves turning to us in the darkness.
The poem is kind of grandiose, sure. It was written by a relatively young man who had been to war, after all. That’s probably why I first loved it as a young person. But Kinnell’s work in general is also skeptical of flourishes for art’s sake, and of the mythmaking move of following your darkness into genius. His NYT obituary called him “plain-spoken,” which is a little deceptive because his sense of the lyric is enormous. I love that Kinnell hated the decadent bullshit of the romantics, at least if his poem “Shelley” is to be believed (this link goes out to a Tumblr, but the poem also appeared in the New Yorker). And I love this book so much, and I think about it a lot, especially now.
I met Kinnell once, when I was a teenager and volunteering at a poetry festival where my big plan was to try and meet some poets (?) as a milestone along my road to becoming a poet. This was before I went to school for it and started meeting poets on the regular — it was an exciting occurrence. At the conference I thought I would be cute and just line up in the signing line to say hi to him, and I didn’t bring my copy of Book of Nightmares to be signed, and I regret that. Kinnell, huge and serious, was puzzled but benevolent when I stood in front of him and shook his hand. I’ve since acquired a first edition, but unsigned it will remain, alas.
This poem is linked here, again: “Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight.” There’s also a beautiful 2018 essay by Dante Di Stefano in The Rumpus about reading this book as a parent in the age of Trump. Go check out both.
I appreciate that you got me to read this poem. I am not the world's greatest poetry reader but I was able to extract more from it than I think I normally would have. I sensed fear and love in the poem but sometimes I think I lack the patience to look deeper at the meaning
Huge thanks for your subscription - so lovely of you! xx