tell me if this is all true

The Story Behind Her Insomnia

EXPOSITION

If she wrote to those she had wronged,
went down on her knees,
would that be enough to atone?

You must be doing something wrong.
Someone come back from the dead
to rebuke and, to endure.

Even the rain won’t ease her.
It beats so hard she fears wash-out,
ruin, the house tumbling down the hillside,

the bed crashing into the coast oaks,
a tangle of blankets and limbs.
You must be doing something wrong.

RISING ACTION

Enter sleep potions: warm milk,
honey, herbs. Enter craving
for the slow deep

breath beside her. I barely
slept, he says. But I heard you.
I heard you, she says, neither

believing the other. Doubt
takes on guises like a dream
where someone says I barely slept.

TURNING POINT

Rain beating on the roof.
You must have done something wrong.
His voice, bundled cloth:

I know if I slept or I didn’t.
Turning away. Turning away:
both of them, bodies
in a bed, a photograph of which says
Rift. Says Look: This is not how they began.
Neither believing the other’s claims

but disguising their loss
by claiming it’s a dream sleeplessness
keeps making them enter.

FALLING ACTION

Someone walking across a river:
someone dead, or her feet would displace
the water: You must be

doing something wrong. She reaches
to touch him, as if the dream keeping him
so quiet might be hers.

I’m sleeping, can’t you see I’m sleeping.
This is not how they began—tangled in
each other’s limbs, the bed a ruin,

DÉNOUEMENT

yet a quieter love has survived
everything, has told them no one escapes
loss, no one gets up from bed without it.

Lynne Knight