Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Insomnia Diary" is a meditation on sleeplessness, observation, and the deep intimacy of witnessing another’s pain. The poem unfolds as an insomniac’s quiet study of a neighboring family, capturing the restless movements of parents tending to a suffering child. The speaker, removed from but deeply attuned to this private struggle, explores the relationship between distance and empathy, between the act of seeing and the impossibility of intervention.

The poem begins with an almost surrealist image: "At 5 a.m. light from their living room sinks fluorescent teeth into powder dropped from the grey womb of clouds already moving to Cleveland, pregnant with snowmen." The description transforms the ordinary into something both menacing and whimsical. The light is "sinking fluorescent teeth," as if it has a carnivorous agency, while the clouds are "pregnant with snowmen," casting an image of a coming storm as a quiet, inevitable birth. The setting—an early morning world where the speaker is awake but detached—establishes a liminal space, a threshold between dreaming and waking, between the interior self and the observed world.

The speaker describes himself as a voyeur, but not in a conventional sense: "I’m a voyeur in the sense that I float through the window of a bungalow as parents take turns holding the scream of their son." The phrase "holding the scream of their son" is striking—it implies that the child's pain is not just something the parents endure, but something they physically take on, an object that can be passed between them. This line establishes the poem’s central theme: the burden of suffering and the profound intimacy of caregiving.

Hicok uses repetition and variation to capture the relentless cycle of the parents’ movements: "Seen the man pace when not holding the child and the woman pace when not holding the child and both pace with the child in their arms, small miles of asking their flesh to heal a stubborn pain." The pacing becomes a kind of ritual, an embodiment of helplessness, as they "ask their flesh to heal"—a gesture both primal and futile. The phrase "small miles" conveys the physical exhaustion of their movement, as well as its metaphorical weight: their love is measured in footsteps, in ceaseless effort.

The speaker acknowledges the deep intimacy of his observation: "This is more intimate than watching sex, which may be a confession. This is more personal than my tongue’s opinion of saffron." The juxtaposition of these two statements is humorous yet profound. The idea that watching suffering is more intimate than watching sex suggests that vulnerability in pain surpasses even vulnerability in desire. The second line—"more personal than my tongue’s opinion of saffron"—introduces an odd but telling comparison: taste is deeply subjective, tied to personal experience, yet even that feels less intimate than what the speaker is witnessing.

The poem then takes a turn toward the surreal: "And though it’s not the dream in which my left hand leaves for a better gardener, in which I stand above myself and pet my eyes, wanting back in, it suggests the dream." This moment introduces a dissociation, a feeling of being separate from oneself, mirroring the separation the speaker feels as an observer. The "left hand leaving for a better gardener" suggests a loss of control, a part of the self seeking nourishment elsewhere. The image of "standing above myself and petting my eyes, wanting back in" evokes an out-of-body experience, a longing for reintegration, for presence.

The final lines bring the focus back to the parents and child: "Or just now, how both parents made a cave around their child, reaching across, reaching through each other until there was one body, and how it felt wrong to stare, almost pornographic to see the hunger of a soul to encounter the nearest thing to itself." The parents' embrace forms a "cave," a protective, organic structure, emphasizing the primal nature of their care. The phrase "reaching across, reaching through each other until there was one body" conveys their unity, their merging into a singular force of love and protection. The speaker’s final realization—that it "felt wrong to stare, almost pornographic"—suggests that he has stumbled upon something so raw, so elemental, that his witnessing becomes intrusive. The phrase "the hunger of a soul to encounter the nearest thing to itself" is especially powerful, reducing existence to its fundamental yearning: to be close, to belong, to merge with another.

"Insomnia Diary" is a poem about distance and proximity, about what it means to witness suffering without the ability to alleviate it. Hicok captures the paradox of sleeplessness—the hyper-awareness, the wandering mind, the moments of eerie connection to strangers in the night. The poem's beauty lies in its restraint, in the way it turns an act of passive observation into a meditation on love, exhaustion, and the desire for closeness.

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