How could anyone sleep?

‘There Was a Great Want of Civility’ 

All night in the trees,

the whispering,

a great disorder, not the way

leaves talk among themselves

during the day, not the rustle

of squirrels and birds among them,

but a tossing, shiftless shadow

weight of darkness,

leaf to leaf.

I dared not close my eyes

for fear it would have

its way with me.

How

could anyone sleep?

By JULIE SUAREZ

from the New York Times Magazine, Feb.3,2017:
This poem is from “The Traveler’s Vade Mecum,” a new anthology of poetry. The anthology takes its title from a 19th-century compendium of 8,466 numbered sentences designed to help travelers compose shorter telegrams; to use this system, the sender and the receiver of the telegram would each have a copy of the book and would communicate such useful messages as “I am onboard a steamer ship bound for Paris” by writing “45-Paris,” or ominous ones like “A sad accident has happened” merely with “461.” The anthology’s editor, the poet and novelist Helen Klein Ross, chose some of these sentences and assigned them to poets to use as titles. The result is a wide-ranging, pleasurable overview of many different approaches in American poetry today. Selected by Matthew Zapruder