artwork: ralph murre
My
Daughters in New York
by
James Reiss
What
streets, what taxis transport them
in
pursuit of union? What suitors amuse them, what mazes
of
avenues tilt & confuse them as pleasure, that pinball,
goes
bouncing off light posts & lands in a pothole,
only
to pop up & roll in the gutter? What footloose new
freedoms
allow them to plow through all stop signs,
careening
at corners, hell-bent for the road to blaze straight?
It’s
10 P.M. in the boonies. My children, I’m
thinking
you’re
thinking your children are waiting
for
you to conceive them while you’re in a snarl
with
my sons-in-law-to-be who want also to be
amazing
explorers beguiled by these reckless night rides
that
may God willing give way to ten thousand good mornings!
~
first published in The Atlantic Monthly
and
subsequently in the Pulitzer-nominated
Ten Thousand Good
Mornings (Carnegie Mellon University
