Today marked the passing of one of the country’s true literary legends, John Updike. I hadn’t featured one of his works since September of 2004, when I shared his poem “The Angels” , so it seemed fitting to dedicate this month’s selection to Updike. I thought this particular poem appropriate to his passing – “…know we go to sleep less to rest than to participate in the twists of another world…”

I hope you enjoy this poem, as we welcome in a New Year, a New Government, a new hope just around the corner…

John Updike
(1932 – 2009)

Tossing and Turning

The spirit has infinite facets,
but the body confiningly few sides.
There is the left,
the right, the back, the belly, and tempting
in-betweens, northeasts and northwests,
that tip the heart and soon pinch circulation
in one or another arm.
Yet we turn each time
with fresh hope, believing that sleep
will visit us here, descending like an angel
down the angle our flesh’s sextant sets,
tilted toward that unreachable star
hung in the night between our eyebrows, whence
dreams and good luck flow.
Uncross your ankles.
Unclench your philosophy.
This bed was invented by others; know we go
to sleep less to rest than to participate
in the twists of another world.
This churning is our journey.
It ends,
can only end, around a corner
we do not know
we are turning.

The Angels

They are above us all the time,
the good gentlemen, Mozart and Bach,
Scarlatti and Handel and Brahms,
lavishing measures of light down upon us,
telling us, over and over, there is a realm
above this plane of silent compromise.
They are around us everywhere, the old seers,
Matisse and Vermeer, Cézanne and Piero,
greeting us echoing in subway tunnels,
springing like winter flowers from postcards,
Scotch-taped to white kitchen walls,
waiting larger than life in shadowy galleries
to whisper that edges of color
lie all about us as innocent as grass.
They are behind us, beneath us,
the abysmal books, Shakespeare and Tolstoy,
the Bible and Proust and Cervantes,
burning in memory like leaky furnace doors,
minepits of honesty from which we escaped
with dilated suspicions. Love us, dead thrones:
sing us to sleep, awaken our eyes,
comfort with terror our mortal afternoons.