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,

...