I.
I was never a good sleeper. When I was growing up, I envied my twin sister’s ability to quickly fall asleep. One night I asked her to show me how she did it. Although I followed her explicit toss-and-turn instructions, no sandman threw his dust at my face to help me fall asleep. With a huge sigh, I rolled out of bed, grabbed my latest Scholastic Book Club selection, and sat on the floor and read, using the light from the hallway until my mother shooed me into bed.
But since I developed a rare, incurable autoimmune skin disease thanks to the COVID booster, since the only effective treatment is 100 mg of prednisone daily for three months, sleep became impossible. Not just because of the itching, which initially felt like one thousand tiny daggers attacking my skin. I fell asleep quickly. When I awoke, I looked toward the bedroom window. Still dark outside. It must be at least 4:00 am. A quick glance at my cell phone told me otherwise. It was 12:30. I’d only slept ninety minutes. Now I was up. Really up. Not tired. Certainly not refreshed. But up. I asked myself a barrage of questions: Do I turn on the light to read? Do I venture to my office? And that led to this hyper-productive and creative period during October 2024.
II.
Lee Krasner, wife of the late Jackson Pollock, had not been in the car with him. She had not seen how much he drank that night, although it certainly wouldn’t have surprised her. As soon as she received the news of his fatal car accident in August 1956, she flew home from Europe where she’d been visiting friends and other painters. She and Pollock considered her time abroad as a trial separation. Now she’d have a permanent one. Their, no, her Long Island house felt so empty without him. Even the dog, Gyp, moped around without Pollock.
No one lay in the bed next to her. No one shuffled about, cigarette in one hand, liquor bottle in the other. What would she do without him? No use tossing and turning when no sandman threw dust in her face. She ambled to Pollock’s art studio, a barn on the property. There on larger-than-life canvases, her paint brush whooshed circle upon circle using only black and white, maybe a little umber. Grief didn’t deserve color. Or maybe it deserved all colors that mesh as black. Night after night, Krasner entered the barn, threw her sorrow at the canvas. Out of pain great work could come.
III.
I complained to the dermatologist about my inability to sleep. During my first bout of this disease in 2021 into 2022, my then-dermatologist prescribed a sleeping aid after much insistence from me. But my new dermatologist said flatly she refused. Did she know something I didn’t?
IV.
In the wee hours, I found the work of Lee Krasner. In the small squares of her 1948 White Squares and her 1949 The Composition, I spotted the silhouettes of my pemphigus vulgaris lesions, crusty and white. In the huge circles of her 1965 Night Creatures, I imagined a Krasner trait of inability to sleep. In her combustive and colorful 1957 The Seasons, I envisioned liberation—freedom from sleeplessness, freedom from prednisone. I watched a video about her life and art on my Kindle. I downloaded a biography by Gail Levi to my Kindle. I watched the 2000 movie, Pollock, starring Marcia Gay Harden and Ed Harris. I watched as Lee Krasner put aside her own work to support her husband’s. After his death, it was her turn to shine. She, like me, couldn’t sleep. I downloaded selected images of her paintings, ten in all, and wrote poetry in response: Krasner on Krasner. Serendipity? Maybe. In response to her 1959 painting, Cool White, I wrote a poem, “An Insomniac’s Horn of Plenty.” Both of us worked hard at closing a rift we didn’t create.
V.
Maybe it was a good thing the doctor refused me a sleeping aid. I wrote dozens of poems and essays. I was on fire!
VI.
In November, the prednisone effects amplified. Each leg ballooned to the size and weight of a thousand-pound sausage. I couldn’t get my legs into the car or the bed without using my hands to manipulate them. I gave up driving. I couldn’t see the computer screen without taking off my glasses and putting my whole head an inch away. My eyes, watering constantly, swelled to slits. My face extended beyond a Zoom box, and my custom-made nightguard no longer fit. One Saturday, my bowels erupted. I told myself, if you could only make it through the night, you can call 911 in the morning. I yelled out for my long-dead mother. In Yiddish. I tried deep breathing with a mantra of “sleep” or “peace.” Until my stomach rumbled and I was in for another attack. In my mind’s eye, all I could see was Caravaggio’s The Lute Player. By morning, after I had transformed the bedroom and bathroom into defecation chambers, I called a grad student of mine who called 911. Somehow, I made it down the stairs to answer the insistent EMT knocking on my front door. Why couldn’t they just knock it down? I don’t remember much about the ambulance ride, except that I was very cold. And why not? All I had on was a nightgown. Not even slippers. When I came to, I was in the ICU and a member of the medical staff said, “Good thing you came when you did.” What I thought might have been food poisoning from the previous night’s chicken and broccoli or some prednisone after-effect, had nothing to do with the truth: I developed a bacterial infection from a previous gall bladder removal surgery that caused septic shock and the onset of kidney and liver shutdown.
VII.
No one ever really sleeps in a hospital.
VIII.
While recuperating–the immediate antibiotic drip reversed my organ shutdown–ideas came to me about new essays I could write. The same thing happened when I was hospitalized again in early January when I compared my own diabetic and at-risk son’s experiences with those of my roommate and started writing a diptych in my head. I had plenty of time to ruminate and take notes on my cell phone.
IX.
By Thanksgiving, the insomnia had passed, I needed a walker to get around even in the house, and I missed that fiery creative period. Now I had no energy or ability to write. My fingers shook. Handwriting was out of the question and even typing became difficult. I still didn’t sleep well, maybe because of the massive diuretics to bring down the swelling. Now it’s March and I’ve stepped down on the prednisone to baby doses. I have regained a good bit of mobility, although the pain and severe itching in my legs keeps me awake. I keep my Kindle nearby to read ekphrastic poetry and anything about Lee Krasner’s work. To use genealogy tools to see if her Krasner line is related to my Krasner line. No sense wasting time.
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Barbara Krasner has been leaning into writing in response to art as a way to grapple with the confluence of several chronic conditions. She feels a special connection to artist Lee Krasner although she has not yet discovered a DNA connection. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and her ekphrastic work has been featured in The Ekphrastic Review, The Mackinaw: A Journal of Prose Poetry, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and elsewhere. Find her at www.barbarakrasner.com
© 2025, Barbara Krasner
Halfway Down the Stairs 