Sometimes by Robert Cooperman

Sometimes, when sleep eludes me
like an escaped balloon, I tell myself,
as if a parent reading a bedtime story,
the folktale of the Grateful Dead:

Sometime during the Middle Ages
a traveling merchant pays the debts
of a recent corpse who’d died a pauper.
The tradesman continues on his way,
and in the middle of a dark wood,
is attacked by highwaymen,
and just as the rogues are about
to kill him for having nothing left to rob,

a rider thunders out of the mist
and drives off the would-be killers,
the merchant gape-mouthed: the horseman
is the wretched pauper, the Grateful Dead,
returning one good deed with another.

My silent recitation calms, comforts me,
eases me into sleep, no matter
how many times I tell it to myself:
knowing goodness is rewarded,
if only in old stories.

Robert Cooperman's latest collection is An Oar for Odysseus (Kelsay Books). His most recent chapbook is To Tell the Tale (Grateful Dead Studies Association).