NOTES:
Leaving Paris on a Train with my Daughter
The light is low revealing hills, thickets, swales and saddles. In an hour it will be dark. She, age 10, sleeps lightly leaning against me. I can just hear her breathing. She would say she is doozing. It is doze I’ve told her. No, dooze DaDa, she informs me.
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Today is the third day of Advent– when the light came down.
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A few days ago, she and I flew direct from Phoenix to Paris. In our bodies night is day, and day, night. Bas ackwards, I can hear my uncle say.
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Sometimes I can get my daughter to go with me when I hunt quail. Call to her lips, she squints and blows, shit cog go. More often than not, the birds call back. And the coy surprise on her face… I’ve got no words for it.
Sleeping on my shoulder she looks comfortable. Cum-sta-bull, she used to say.
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I slowly take from my bag a book and tear the butt from our fresh baguette. An older woman across the aisle is watching me. She is wearing well-made leather riding boots.
I see you are reading Jim Harrison, she says.
Yes, I say not too loud. And smile.
I met him. Heard him read years ago in Paris. We love him here.
He lived quite a few of his winters in southern Arizona, I tell her. After he died, to mark it, I took some expensive French cheese I brought home and a couple of his books of poetry and drug my camper down there for a few days.
I am so happy to see an American reading Jim Harrison, she tells me.
We are comrades, I say.
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When our dog was sedated, my daughter stroked his head saying he was seduced.
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In the Louvre we spent an hour on the third floor in front of Rembrandt’s “Flayed Ox.” We claimed the gallery bench. I gave her my phone to text her mother and brother. Until yesterday I had only seen reproduced images in books. I made drawings from them. In two graduate theses, I wrote about this hollowed carcass hanging all crucifix-like.
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Among the words my daughter insists I used too much when we lived in Oregon and she was little are: seminary, theological, exhibition and earth as body / body as earth.
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This Friday my little girl and I take the sleeper train from Prague to the Liptov. Sunday in the village of Dovalovo we will have zabiatchka. After killing the meat hog we will take apart its body and make food with what I’ve found of my family. The remnant. Blood.
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The train slides, bends, cuts across the landscape.
A sharpened knife.
The deal we made on this trip is she gets her ears pierced, and I get another tattoo. The word KRV –Slovak for blood, in an old church Slavonic font on my right wrist. She and I wondered about the word VODO on my left wrist but decided it would look too much like VODKA.
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The lights come all the way down. It is now dark.
My daughter still doozing against my shoulder.
________________
Craig Goodworth
Review by Debra Kaufman
I love the play of language and the feeling of mutual affection in this poem between the speaker and his daughter. The entire vignette has the feel and rhythm of riding on a train, giving oneself up to the experiences that are unfolding—the deliciousness of not having the responsibility of driving. The daughter’s pronouncing words her way even after being corrected show both her youth and a belief in her own self. Along the way we learn it is a kind of pilgrimage to connect with relatives. Clearly the speaker and the daughter have their own connection. Opening and closing with “dozing” is quite wonderful.
Review by Marc Janssen
This work strikes me as stream of conscious writing. One of the remarkable things about it is the mispronunciation of words throughout the poem: First by the daughter, then by an adult uncle, then the quail call, there are a lot of them. For the speaker, the note taker, none of the mispronunciations seem to bother him, he seems to let them stand, except for himself. In the second to last stanza, he decides to not have a tattoo that could be misinterpreted for something else.