Daisy Fried
Daisy Fried is the author of two books of poems, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn't Mean to Do It, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. For her poetry, she's received Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships. She reviews books of poetry for the New York Times and Poetry magazine, received Poetry magazine's Editors Prize for a Feature Article, for “Sing, God-Awful Muse,” about Paradise Lost and breastfeeding, and is a guest blogger for Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation. She currently teaches creative writing at Villanova University, and lives in South Philadelphia with her husband, the writer Jim Quinn, and their daughter.
I, too, dislike it.
However,
I was trying to not think
when out of the gaping wound
of the car-detailing garage (smells like metallic
sex)
came a Nissan GT-R fitted with an oversized
spoiler.
Backing out sounded like clearing the throat of
god.
A gold snake zizzed around the license plate.
Sunburst hubcaps, fancy undercarriage
installation
casting a pool of violet light on the pocked
pavement
of gum blots. Was it this that filled me with
desire?
The percussionist is the only skinny member
of the American high school marching band
playing the Luxembourg Gardens bandstand
under overspreading horse-chestnut trees.
The massy, meat-bound, milk-fed teens
hold their tubas like dads hold pubescent
daughters. Like they're too big
to be held. Like they love them like babies.
Now the boy trombonist steps forward.
His band jacket hangs open around a heavy
belly he's too young for. He begins a solo
designed to show how slow he can play,
and how fast. Impossible to know why
French people stay for these ineptitudes.
But they do, and we do, Jim and me,
tap our feet and kindly clap. Ah, their children
run around in the dust. They run with sticks.
Lummox clouds push over, abut, stay put,
drop drizzle that hardly manages its way
through the cover of hand-shaped
leaves that touch and touch together. Ah,
the Paris children are running under them
with sticks in chic baby clothes: not pinks,
not blues—oranges, oxbloods, olives.
The man who announces the songs is proud
of his translations. "Et maintenant," he says,
"'Home on the Range.' Ou, (pause) 'Maison sur
l'espace ouvert.'" House on the Open Space!—
gets me and Jim giggling. And I think,
as the boy takes up his trombone again,
the French see in American brass the U.S.A.
they loathe and love: something beautifully crass.
We all love what others have done wrong to.
Last night we went to hear writers of serious
American westerns at an English-language
bookstore—upstairs room, chairs shoved
among shelves, too many books, people,
carpet grubby—stories where Indians and bears
kept wandering and seeking. At the Q&A,
the half-mad bookstore owner kept abusively
asking, "ze bear in your story, he symbols
somezing, no? American violence? ze bombing
of Serbia?" I whispered to Jim, "yeah, well,
what about the French in the 60s in Algeria?"
(I was so pissed.) In the metro that night,
four cops hassled an Arab, machine guns
strapped to their backs. The Arab: resigned,
half-scared. Everyone just kept looking
away, going by. But here I am now, under
these trees with this iffy, distant weather,
thinking about, well...swans, wishing
for tragic swans to land their alien selves
under this green bigtop, walk among us,
do a comic dying swan act—real swans
in their feathers, not girls in tutus, and they'll
dance Swan Lake—to Home on the Range.
What if they pecked and plucked the sticks
away from the children, laid their pellet-heads
in the lap of, say, that man there with his dark blue,
red-piped, gold-buttoned blazer and perfect
white hair. Or in the lap of my husband, Jim.
Now trombone boy pulls to a shaky end—
we ought to go but we sit a long time more,
holding hands, listening to American
brass filling up all of every thing, the trees,
the park, these interrupted spaces, paths,
kids, dust, the French, our hearts, with its
sound like money, like bombs falling in air,
bombs falling now on Afghanistan.
May '01/Jan. '02
Daisy Fried is the author of two books of poems, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn't Mean to Do It, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. For her poetry, she's received Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships. She reviews books of poetry for the New York Times and Poetry magazine, received Poetry magazine's Editors Prize for a Feature Article, for "Sing, God-Awful Muse," about Paradise Lost and breastfeeding, and is a guest blogger for Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation. She currently teaches creative writing at Villanova University, and lives in South Philadelphia with her husband, the writer Jim Quinn, and their daughter.
"American Brass" and "Women's Poetry" are reprinted by permission of the author, Daisy Freed.