Rules of Sleep
Do Bodies at Rest Ever Stop?
Nearly everything has rules. Society is governed by what it is told it cannot do in specific situations. Sometimes the rules are not even drawn up, but everyone knows that they still exist. Interestingly, knowledge of rules is not enough, one has to be willing to follow them or sometimes just as significantly they need to be able to break them.
Finding Comfort
The persona of the poem sets into action a quirky tone with the first line, “In the sludge drawer of animals in arms” (1). In the poem, the bed is not a safe place that offers a chance for recovery from the trials of the everyday. The bed in the poem is filled with a disgusting “sludge” possibly from the sweat and filth of the sleepers who must not be at rest. The sleepers in the bed are “animals in arms”: primitive, uncultured, and ready to do battle to one another during what is typically assumed to be a time of recuperation.
The poem shifts from heat and moisture to a scene that is cold and dark because “the legs entwine to keep the body warm / Against the winter night” (2-3). Despite the sleepers at first being in a “drawer” of “sludge” the poem transitions to a different type of discomfort. Cold. The room is so cold that despite how the sleepers’ “legs entwine” they cannot stave off the night because “some cold seeps through” (3). The persona is starting to juggle paradox.
Who's Rules?
The next line propels the reader into “the future” (4), but not a future brightened by a “square of stars / In the windowpane, suggesting the abstract / And large” (4-6). The future seems to dismiss the realm of infinity and it grounds itself back to a cold image of isolation. From “a sudden shift in position” (6) not in the stars as the enjambment would initially suggest, but rather of the bodies in the “drawer” the poem centers itself in the desolation of sleeping bodies. One body moves and “That lets one body know the other’s free to move / An inch away, and then a thousand miles” (7-8). Happily, the rules mentioned above also apply to space and time. Unfortunately, the ideal of one sleeper may not coincide with the unwritten rules of the other sleeper.
Alone Together
In relationships the rules are not written. The rules exist abstractly as a scaffold for compromise that allow for both partners to have equal access to what they consider to be comfortable or acceptable. In the bedroom the unwritten rules of sleep often suggest an innate need for lovers to stay together throughout the night as one. In wintertime especially it can be beneficial for lovers to share in the warmth of their bodies, but the tangled web of appendages can occasionally produce discomfort. One lover may move “An inch away / and then a thousand miles” for temporary relief from the heat. How should the other lover react? If a person is willing to stay away then “even intimacy / is only another form of separation” (9-10). Must the rules of one relationship be the rules for another relationship? Is one night the standard for all nights? Cannot the paradox of intimacy be enough to sustain…anything?
The Paradox
The Earth is great in the sense of its perceived immensity, but compared to the universe it is miniscule. Every relationship is affected by action and inaction, love and hate, closeness and space. Intimacy is a “form of separation” because only when we become close to people do we know what it feels like to be alone, lost in space.
Howard Moss
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