Reading Myself to Sleep in My Hometown of Manhattan

( after Billy Collins )
  
   
   
I look forward to enlightenment as I am about to  
retire to a bedroom in a master suite overlooking    
the upper Manhattan skyline of lights that remain  
burning while I plan to sail in a glorious sendoff.  
   
A snifter of brandy helps to set aside anticipation  
of watching fireworks at midnight from forty floors,  
to put me on track the choice of leather I’ll read.  
   
A soft swish of diaphanous curtains sway across  
from stem to stern with a click by remote control  
in a city’s lull of harbor lights and boats docked full.  
   
The other sounds subside to permit I scan pages    
while serenely letting me drift within the book’s  
intent to take my mind and breath away up river,  
   
and around the first bend of a fantasy solidified  
as I exhale the way a river sighs and starts to drift  
along the sultry wake of turning pages floating by.  
   
To entice I tip into the underlife slipping on endless,    
sinking into the luxury of letting go, the book to fall  
as I travel through adventures that will never exist,  
and the fish take me back as liners pass by Liberty.