Academy of American Poets
View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
Want more poems?
Subscribe to our
Poem-A-Day emails.
FURTHER READING
Poems by Farid Matuk
My Daughter All Yourn
Related Poems
Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
by Patricia Smith
Poems About Daughters
A Little Tooth
by Thomas Lux
A Newborn Girl at Passover
by Nan Cohen
A Prayer for my Daughter
by W. B. Yeats
Achill
by Derek Mahon
Daughters in Poetry
by Eavan Boland
Daughters, 1900
by Marilyn Nelson
For a Daughter Who Leaves
by Janice Mirikitani
Heart's Needle
by W. D. Snodgrass
Home After Three Months Away
by Robert Lowell
Interstate Highway
by James Applewhite
Ladders
by Elizabeth Alexander
Morning Song
by Sylvia Plath
My Daughter All Yourn
by Farid Matuk
Poems about Daughters
Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
by Patricia Smith
The Bistro Styx
by Rita Dove
The Pomegranate
by Eavan Boland
The Writer
by Richard Wilbur
Sponsor a Poet Page | Add to Notebook | Email to Friend | Print

My Daughter Among the Names

 
by Farid Matuk

Difficult once I've said things 

to know them this morning

the lights above the tollway all off 

at exactly 7:36

all "we took our yellow from the pewter sky."


But we have so many 

things!   Stories

about our diction, the leather couch

some trees and our ages.

What about all the rooms the sky makes—


she tried several 

spaces today, under a desk, a nook

bent to her.

I thought of picking a fight

with dead Bachelard.

Her small body a new host for

waters, spaces brought round

for viruses, their articulations, their ranges.  


Think of all the products 

left behind by a shift in design—

iPod cases, dancers called spirit rappers

sites where "women, negroes, natives were acted out" 

for Rev. Hiram Mattison "vehicles of impurity."


"My children too have learned

a barbarous tongue, though it's not so sure

they will rise to high command"— Tu Fu or

Bernadette Mayer on Hawthorne's American Notebooks

a boy tried to hang a dog in a playground, she said.


O structural inequalities!  O explanations!

The owner of the desert house we rented

plants butterfly bushes, cenizo, and columns 

of dark leaves where birds go. 

Sharp sweet dung smell off the horse trailer 


after it pulls away.  

What about all the rooms the sky makes?  

Faint blue expanse

a long far line of electric poles

a mountain I can see.  Dog yelps almost digital


maybe from inside a car at the Dollar General.  

She made her first marks today

on this page      

rain    hand      here









Copyright © 2011 by Farid Matuk. Used with permission of the author.
Larger TypeLarger Type | Home | Help | Contact Us | Privacy Policy Copyright © 1997 - 2013 by Academy of American Poets.