helpful as ever, Hotel Point provides a epigraph for my poem below--

"And Melville, in a letter: "For my part, I love sleepy

fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wideawake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something

sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible and sociable millions of good fellows all taking a good long snooze together, under the sod . . ." (Paul Metcalf

told me that.) So we nod, and resume, we toss on our pallets, we sleep like dogs, thumping. "