Insomnia
by Dana Gioia

Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore.

But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you’ve worked for these past years,
the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
the moving parts about to come undone,
and twisting in the sheets remember all
the faces you could not bring yourself to love.

How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.


Dana Gioia, “Insomnia” from 99 Poems: New and Selected.  © 2016 Graywolf Press. (buy now)

Today is Christmas Eve, the subject of the beloved holiday poem that begins:

"Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there."

It's Christmas week, and we're celebrating with Christmas stories. There's a story called "Dancing Dan's Christmas," by Damon Runyon. (books by this author) Runyon set many stories in New York City of the Roaring Twenties, creating characters who coolly defied Prohibition laws.

It's Christmas Eve and a few buddies are at a speakeasy owned by Good Time Charley on West 47th and Columbus. They're drinking mugs of hot Tom and Jerry, glossed by the narrator as "an old-time drink that is once used by one and all in this country to celebrate Christmas with, and in fact it is so popular that many people think Christmas is invented only to furnish an excuse for hot Tom and Jerry."

There's a knock at the front door and in comes a good-looking, well-dressed young guy by the name of Dancing Dan, and he's got a package under one arm. Dan's legendary for his dancing skills and also for his suspected involvement in illegal activities. He throws down the package and has a few rounds of Tom and Jerrys, declares that he likes the drink so much he'd recommend Tom and Jerry to everyone he knows, except that he does not know anyone good enough for Tom and Jerry, "except maybe Miss Muriel O'Neill" — a nightclub employee whom he adores.

They lock the front door to the speakeasy as a precaution against running out of Tom and Jerry for themselves, put a sign up that the place is closed on account of Christmas, and keep drinking. A guy dressed as Santa knocks on the door, and they recognize that it's their pal Ooky, who's usually a janitor for a clothing store but this week has been doing advertising duty dressed up as Santa. They let him in and give him Tom and Jerrys, and he soon passes out drunk. A very intoxicated Dancing Dan decides to try on Santa Claus's outfit. They strip snoring Santa of his suit, put it on Dancing Dan, and decide to go do Santa's work: stuff stockings.

The enthusiastic drunk men head up Broadway a couple blocks to W. 49th Street, wishing Merry Christmas to passers-by, and arrive at the little tenement flat where Miss Muriel O'Neill lives with her grandma. They walk through an unlocked door and find a patched-up, heavily-mended stocking. Dancing Dan unslings his Santa sack, opens the package he'd had under his arm when he came into the speakeasy hours before, and dumps out a bunch of diamonds — diamond rings, diamond bracelets, diamond brooches and diamond necklaces — into Grandma's hung stocking.

The narrator suddenly remembers headlines from the afternoon papers about the robbery of a diamond merchant. A few weeks later, he learns that Grandma O'Neill dies just after Christmas believing that there is a God. Her daughter, Muriel, called the diamond merchant to return the stolen goods, and he rewards her with $10,000 for her honesty. And outlaw Dancing Dan has gone off to San Francisco to reform himself of his outlaw ways so that he can train to become a dance instructor and in good faith court Miss Muriel O'Neill.

"Dancing Dan's Christmas" can be found in Guys and Dolls: The Stories of Damon Runyon (1992). It can also be found in a treasury entitled Christmas Stories (2007), edited by Diana Secker Tesdell, part of the Everyman's Pocket Classics series (buy here).

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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