There was this girl who lived in a cottage in the woods. It was made of gingerbread and candy. The girl was always asleep. But, oneday, she woke up. She woke up.

I only want to sleep. . . and never wake.

Sleep well tonight my prince of darkness, for tomorrow you will have a big day.

Until now, in spite of everything, I had welcomed each new day as though it were a new life, where all past failures and problems were erased, and all future possibilities and joys open and available, to be achieved probably before night fell again. Now, in this winter of snow, I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of the night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn't make yourself over between dawn and dusk.

I think the woods outdoors are half asleep, left over like those promises I never keep.

And death took root in that sleep. In that sleep, I held an ice baby and I rocked it, and was rocked by it. Oh Madonna, hold me. I am a small handful.

Love twists me, a Spanish flute plays in my blood, and yet, I can see only your little sleep, an empty place.

Oh, I feel dead, folded away in my blankets for good, and forgotten. And I lie sleeping with one eye open, hoping that nothing, nothing will happen.

There is the sleep of my tongue, speaking a language I can never remember - words that enter the sleep of words once they are spoken. There is the sleep of one moment inside the next, lengthening the night. Even the wooden sleep of the moon is possible. And there is the sleep that demands I lie down and be fitted to the dark that comes upon me like another skin in which I shall never be found, out of which I shall never appear.

It is too late to travel or even find a reason to make it seem worthwhile. Already now, the evening reaches out to take the aging world away. And soon the dark will come, and these tired elders feel the need to go indoors where each will lie alone in the deep and sheepless pastures of a long sleep.

In this place, where the sound of sirens never ceases and people move like a ghostly traffic from home to work and home, and the poor in their tenements speak to their gods and the rich do not hear them, every sound is merged, this moonlit night, into a distant humming, as if the city, finally, were singing itself to sleep.