Sunday, March 30, 2014

Poem for Sunday, Truman Show, Brookside Flowers

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

--------

It was a very rainy Saturday, though thankfully not very cold. Adam went to a track meet in the morning and called requesting that we bring towels for himself and the friend he carpooled with. We had him home from Gaithersburg before noon, had lunch, and went out to do a bunch of shopping (new bicycle tire pump, hair stuff, cat stuff, Michaels).

In the late afternoon I did a bunch of bead reorganization (I inherited a bunch of beads from a friend months ago and I'd never even sorted them). After dinner we watched The Truman Show, in part because Adam had never seen it -- like Bob Roberts, I think it has actually gotten more relevant now that some of its excesses are more believable!

After Adam went to bed, we caught up on Nashville which is the biggest soap opera ever but had three great songs this week. And we watched Wolverine: The Musical, in which Hugh Jackman crosses over Les Mis and X-Men, hee! Since our daffodils stayed closed for the weather today, here are some photos from Brookside's conservatory last month:











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