Toddler Sleep Schedules

My sleep schedule is completely wrecked.

Actually, it's the sleep schedule that I fall into periodically.  I can  barely keep my eyes open in the early evening, I finally give up and go to bed between 6:00 and 7:45, I wake up very early between 2 and 3 a.m.  I'm most aware of this alternate sleep schedule, which I call my toddler sleep schedule, in the autumn, when we end daylight savings time.  This time, I've fallen into this sleep schedule because of my cold combined with my work schedule.

I lay in bed wondering if it was time to get up, and for a brief moment, I thought I saw a person with a flashlight moving in the trees beyond my bedroom window.  The back yard area that I can see from my bedroom window is fairly impassible with downed trees, so I was pretty sure it wasn't a flashlight.  Distant headlights?  The first summer fireflies?  Mystical creatures, with flashlights or the light of their own inner goodness?

I also had a memory of a poem that I wrote years ago, which sent me on a hunt for it.  First I went to the folder where I keep all the poems that I once thought were publishable, but have yet to find a home for them, outside of my folders.  I didn't find the folder, but I did find a poem that I barely remembered writing.  I changed all the contact information and moved into the folder of poems in active circulation.

I went to the file of published poems and found the poem there.  I did a bit more digging and found this blog post from over 10 years ago (10 years ago!!!) that announced the poem's 2014 publication in Slant.

Here is the poem, in all its quirky strangeness:

Insomnia



No one sleeps at our house.
In the attic, the monks keep
their vigil; Psalms chanted
undergird the night.

The younger brother catalogs
the fish tanks and the ant farm.
The older brother conducts
experiments and charts the sky’s
passage through the hours.

The poet lights a single candle
and composes sonnets until dawn.
We can hear her counting
iambic pentameter as she paces.

One grandmother arranges flowers
and then resorts them.
One grandmother continues
her life’s project: to attempt
every pie recipe that ever existed.

The choir performs concerts
complete with a string quartet.
We think the grass grows faster
with a musical accompaniment.

All the mothers and fathers are invited
to dance in the basement ballroom.
The bright chandeliers trick
the senses into believing time’s illusion.

And I pull the comforter close.
I read stories from my youth:
of spunky girl detectives
with absent parents
or families on prairies
who build houses of sod
in just three days.