In the Heart of the Night

In the Heart of the Night

1

I wake in the dark from a dream,

driving to Utica again,

it’s snowing and we’re late.

I carry the Knausgaard

down to the hotel lobby for a

beer in the mortuary silence

of sleep’s gravity. The restaurant’s

closed, the waiters and waitresses

drinking behind shutters,

laughing and joking in Polish. Young

Knausgaard is watching himself at age seven,

heart on display, already skeptical

of his own surveillance: “It should be

allowed to beat in secret,

hidden from our sight…

you understood that when you saw it,

a little animal without eyes”;

but of course

the heart has eyes,

not its own,

and we watch ourselves

watching it, as much our heart

as the heart itself.

2

How easily I

recall those first days.

I paced your bookshelves, you kept

pouring coffee, the hours into

single digits,

your beauty,

how I watched my heart

know your beauty would

possess me

the rest of my life.

3

And that other night,

when I was alone with her,

reading, to keep from

hearing her breathe, it

was the last night, I was

last to sit with her, I could

not bear to think she might

die alone, the silence, how

it pressed down, and her

breathing, it came in waves

and would stop for seconds

at a time, then again,

this erratic shore; and the

waiting had exhausted me,

overcame my desire

to be the one good son

so you came down to do

what I could not do, which

was to sit through that half silence

until morning, while I slept

at your feet in relief.

4

A gentle silence, this night

I can’t be with you,

the rattle of the streets

pushes me outside,

the row of shops

across from the hotel —

an off-license, closed, a

Thai bar, people stand outside

smoking, and a hair salon, in which

I see two figures entwined

on a couch in the dark.

It’s late, and

I can’t imagine why

they’d still be there.

A bus passes

and the shop is there again

and they’re up,

moving around in the dark,

it doesn’t seem possible, but

it looks to me like

they’re dancing.

About the Author

About the Author

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual, and author of two books of nonfiction, The Tyranny of E-mail and How to Read a Novelist. He has also edited two anthologies of writing on inequality, Tales of Two Cities and Tales of Two Americas. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York, where he teaches at The New School and is writer-in-residence at New York University. The executive editor at LitHub, he has published poems in Zyzzyva, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Nation. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Also by John Freeman

Also by John Freeman

NONFICTION

How to Read a Novelist