halfway to sleep... by Dan Thompson
i have watched them walk out of the trees
their naked bodies trailing
leaves drifting off shoulders
and trapped in their hair
they sometimes look me over
and smile
unafraid
nymphs of oak and beech and maple
running together across the fields
sometimes joining their second cousins
in lakes and streams and nighttime dreams
talking and laughing in a language i know
only when crossing the threshold to sleep
then i understand
awake i can sometimes make out
a word
but only if i’m not really
listening
As soon as I start to pay attention,
attune my ears to their too-distant voices…
splashing water and wind in the leaves
Bio
Dan Thompson (PhD) is a U.S. Army veteran and former journal editor whose creative and critical work has appeared in a wide range of literary and scholarly journals, including, within the past year, issues of Feral, Canary, Eclectica, The Raven Review, The Good Life Review, Black Coffee Review, Rat’s Ass Review, and Jerry Jazz Musician, among others. In an earlier life, he worked as a music producer for educational videos and as a disc jockey at a country music radio station.
Author's note
The entities the poem centers around are the dryads and naiads (tree spirits and water spirits) of Greek mythology. Many cultures around the world have placed spirits in trees and in bodies of water; in ancient Greece, these spirits were personified as nymphs (or nymphae) – young-women minor deities.
The specific topic of the poem is the narrator’s awareness (or not) of these nature spirits. The lack of punctuation and capitalization for most of the poem is intended, and is meant to indicate the state of semi-consciousness that people sometimes experience when they’re on the threshold of sleep.
The penultimate stanza is different. The narrator is experiencing a more-wakeful, more-focused state of consciousness, indicated by the use of punctuation and capital letters:
As soon as I start to pay attention,
attune my ears to their too-distant voices…
But this is fruitless. The nymphae can only ever be partially apprehended by humans – and only when those humans are not fully awake.
