TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

Poems so often say the things we can’t. They give language and shape to ideas that feel too big for words — like love, and mortality, and grief. Today’s poem does just that, and I’m grateful for it.

Sleep
by Matthew Dickman

I don’t remember what I was told

when I was eight years old

and my grandfather died

and his body was cremated so it was no longer

a big body made small by cancer but a smaller body

made insignificant by fire.

I might have been told he was sleeping

and I might have been waiting

in the rain at his funeral,

watching the gold colored urn of him

being placed into a marble wall,

waiting for him to wake up

and become big again.

I might have, in my little blue suit

and black patent leather shoes,

hoped that something, the sound of the rain,

or an angel made out of wet grass and wet pine needles

and the wet faces of the mourners, would wake him up.

Tonight, I just want Richard to wake up.

I want to be a smoker again

and pull a lighter out of my back pocket

and light the cigarette I just bummed from him

while we stand close together under the evergreen

in Vermont

that shot straight up through the rain and clouds.

I want him to wake up and re-enter the gore of his body,

its pink and gray anatomy,

and find some clothes and find some shoes

and walk across the earth and sit next to me.

And sit next to Connie

and sit next to Ellen and sit next to Sue

and sit next to Trinie, Nick, Marie, and Michael, too.

And if he’s too tired from being dead for three days

I’ll go to him, naked in the undressing of my mind.

Right now, my children are sleeping

and will one day be dead in their lives.

Right now I am halfway through my life

and I will be dead, as dead as a mouse,

as dead as any other creature.

Right now, the only life I want back

is Richard’s life.

I want the god of horizons and the god of lodestones

and the god of drawbridges and caravans and mangers

and money and mascara and dildos

and the god of ships

and fish and eggs and earthquakes and the god

of all kinds of things wanted

to breathe him back and body him back

and carry him back because,

oh lord I loved him.

But if he can’t come back.

If he can’t ever wake up again,

then I want nothing but his absence.

I want that absence whole and warm and alive.

I want to be able to sit next to it and hug it

and talk about the shitty morning I had

when I dropped the last of the milk

and how it poured across the floor

and how my youngest sat

in front of his dry bowl of cereal

and looked at me

and how I looked out the kitchen window just then

and saw nothing.

No sky, no trees, no birds, no rain,

no cars, no yard, not even a neighbor's house.

"Sleep" by Matthew Dickman. Used by permission of the poet.