When I was young, he said,
I would imagine myself on a raft,
Floating downstream in the sun.
That is how I would sleep.
Thank you father, old fish. I am afraid
Of drowning, I do not swim well,
And sheep for me have lost their soft monotony.
I have been a few hours asleep
In the past three nights.
If I stare at the ceiling
For long,
The corners start to bend,
As if the walls are slowly,
Slowly breathing.
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Great to see so many new posts around the neighborhood.
With this poem, I think it is desirable to stay in the place where surreality calls the shots. You can certainly use this to your advantage if you want (i.e., do not allow the surreality to remain in the poem; use it to mirror the insomniac's force of will), but to my mind the first five lines of the poem dominate the rest.
The reason I applaud the first four lines in particular is how they exist in multiple imaginations - the reader's, the "son's," even the father's. For all of this, the language remains pristine and penetrable.
As the Good Doctor once said, "It's hard to get the news from poems." I believe another reason the first five lines rattle me is their ability to present what could otherwise be a maudlin subject in a new light. The fifth line I think is lovely, though I would urge, as I am wont to do, that you just run with the strangeness of it and toss the comma. What this does is eliminate the caesura between "father" and "old," thus creating an almost sacerdotal identity (Father Old Fish), and adding a depth to the speaker's relation to the father's anecdote.
I find "I am afraid / of drowning" a moment in which it is hard to get the news. This is certainly a moment in which the poem names something we are all scared of, but it's also something of which we are all aware. This is why I suggest the poem remain in the landscape of the first five lines. Why are you afraid of drowning, I want to say, because of what?
"I have been a few hours asleep / In the past few nights" strikes me the same way. What makes this urgent?
While I am fond of the image of corners "slowly breathing," I don't know that "For long" stands alone as a line. This stanza, to me, does not seem to finish the poem. This is not to say you need some painter's flourish to dazzle us out the door of the poem; rather, I sense there is more to be said in the poem, more to be disinterred from the insomniac's fog.
You have a fine ear for how to pace a poem (I would call them slow poems; slow and incantatory), so don't for your life lose that. Where you bump into trouble is placing all this weight upon a two-word line whose speech maybe cannot support the other levels of the poem. Since I've begun an architectural metaphor, think of the preposition and adjective in "For long" as two I-beams, trying as they might to support so many other strong and sensory nouns.
It might also be worth exploring the antagonistic relationship established in the first stanza.
L,
D
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