There are few variables in human existence, and we frequently inquire into those which involve our desire or textured parables about love. The irreducible aspect of our existence is, however, its loss. In her sweetly disheartening, revealing sestina “Another Bedtime Story”, Stallings renders this – the fact of our dying – as the allusive lesson for daughter and son through the underlying (a blanket on cold concrete) truth of children’s bedtime stories. Stallings uses the sestina form and its – for this poem – insistent, not-to-be-denied, morosely-instructional-repetitions to assure this unpalatable message is delivered to the reader.

Her diagnosis: “All, all of the stories are about going to bed” where going to bed is death’s surrogate which she presses on us with the internal-line repetition of “All, all” (yes, I’m sorry, but all) of these stories are to prepare you, my sweet, sweet child, for your coming grave as mimicked in sleep. This image of a parent cradling her child through the reading of a bedtime story as a message of death seems startlingly contrary, yet it is not. Perhaps it is like a kind of harmonious view of the Pieta in its caressing beauty, but, if touched, the Pieta is hard, cold marble and is a cradling of death, immeasurable loss. If, as parents, we contend we give our children life, then, in a stark accounting, we must also confess we give them death.

Stallings’ book Olives concludes with this poem. In an interview in The Courtland Review about ten years before the book’s publication, she said: “A huge number of fairy tales and nursery rhymes have dark sides, and we do a disservice to Disneyfying everything for kids.” She is right. And this thought presages this poem written at a point in her life where she now has two children and has likely read a lot of bedtime stories. But the point, whether it intersects with her life or not, is just true: “The tales that start with once and end with ever after,/All, all of the stories are about going to bed” (14,15). And the real ever after is contused with unending silence.

Stallings patterns proof through her poem with examples from simple tales repeated generationally like “Goldilocks snug upstairs, the toothy wolf instead/Of grandmother tucked in the quilts, crooning closer closer—” (4, 5). Here the wolf is both an example of death and a bringer of death. Or: “The snow-pale princess sleeps…and dreams of a lost lover” (7, 8). And, in the one tale where it might – we hope – end differently, she gently, credibly chides us back:

Even the one about witches and ovens and gingerbread

In the dark heart of Europe—can children save each other?—

You start to doubt it a little. It doesn’t need to be said. (10-12)

Through the tender scalpel of her writing – the language is simple, understated, and unwavering as that of a fairy tale – along with the disappointed, but undeniable, reassertions of the sestina, Stallings exposes a truth that is likely as disheartening for her as it is for us: That we end, but more painfully: Our children end: And they must and will learn this. So, though “it mustn’t be said” (18) – which seems a sudden withdrawal, but, in truth, how could we articulate what we don’t understand and how could it possibly be received – the unknowable truth still remains:

All, all of the stories are about going to bed,

About coming to terms with the night, alleviating the dread

Of laying the body down, of lying under a cover.

That’s why our children resist it so. That’s why it mustn’t be said:

All, all of the stories are about going to bed (16-19).