Good Day
Rent from DeepDyve- Good Day
And today was a good day, whatwith your rising to bathe and dressthe daughter, put her on the bus,and let me sleep. I sleep and sleepand cannot wash it out of me, tiredfear that rests too much on now.The day goes on, backing up its hornof plenty to this house, that house,not this house. We think there isdelivery, sometimes there is delivery.Then she sleeps, the wife, and I wake,and the daughter grinds her head into thesockets. Nothing appears as it always doeslike nothing you’ve seen before, closerin the mirror, and more real, the collapseof time, this dark bright hour, the houseabed and blazing, a keening and a rockingand a whimper, make it stop. Present isthis gift of the daughter’s enormous need,and absent is the dream of her own dream,a blue house and yellow car, two Chinese dogs,and a child of her own, the joys of returningto the baby body of brood. I cannot shakethis futureless dream from sleep. It is nothopeless—she brings a joy as “swim” and“more” and “movie”—but it is wholly child,a simple life without her own earned heartbreak.I stanch the fear of my own death and herperpetual childhood. Today was a good day. [End Page 117]
Matthew Cooperman is the author of, most recently, the text and image collaboration Imago for the Fallen World, with Marius Lehene (Jaded Ibis Press, 2013). A new full-length collection, Spool, is forthcoming in 2016 as the winner of the New Measure Prize, from Free Verse Editions. A founding editor of Quarter After Eight, and co-poetry editor of Colorado Review, Cooperman teaches at Colorado State University. He lives in Fort Collins with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang, and their two children.
