A Bedtime Story by Clay Matthews

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend July 8, 2014   A Bedtime Story   Clay Matthews

Pipe tobacco and the passing of clouds. The small promises of collarbones and cedar shingles. Has it been so long since I’ve really said anything? My days are filled with meaningless words and the child’s laughter. Little of what I do is important, but maybe the ways are. The crows outside bathing in the gutters, the strange necessity of holding up an appearance and nodding our heads at dinner parties. If I misspoke, if I misunderstood… A litany of the stains that show through on white T-shirts and hands. What comes out in the wash are afternoons and sand from the sandbox, a migration of beaches to backyards, backyards to the bottoms of sewer lines and imaginations: what shore do the waves in my dreams arrive from? Sometimes I hear you sing there. You bade me speak, and I howled. You bade me roll over, and I played dead. I show up beside you in bed with a dozen bad similes about love. Don’t ask me what they mean, or if I am ever         —I don’t know. Only the streetlight coming in and out behind the curtains, our shadows making shadows on the wall. Your eyes gone heavy at the sound of my voice, reading you these things others have written.            Copyright @ 2014 by Clay Matthews. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Both my wife and daughter like it when I read to them at night before bed. Sometimes, it seems like one of the most important things I do. There are several ways, I think, to deal with darkness, several ways to express the thousand things we can’t get to with our own words. Bedtime stories are one way—these little yellow tickets that open up our dreams.” —Clay Matthews   Clay Matthews is the author of Pretty, Rooster (Cooper Dillon, 2010). He teaches at Tusculum College and lives in Greeneville, Tennessee. Most Recent Book by Matthews   Pretty, Rooster (Cooper Dillon, 2010) “Goodnight Moon” by James Arthur “Daughter-Mother-Maya-Seeta” by Reetika Vazirani “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038