That summer a long friendship ended
and I couldn’t sleep. I was reading
a biography of Virginia Woolf
and I had a sense of myself as no longer
inside my own life, not quite,
and my husband must have felt it, too,
both of us drawing back like horses
from an unfamiliar stir in the grass.
In the last hours of night I would rise,
and though it was too early for coffee
I liked to make a cup and sit outside
under the stars, whose light reached me
as a kind of afterthought. Virginia
had insomnia, too. When I did sleep,
I dreamed I was young again,
and just setting out on a tangled path.