James Reiss

MY DAUGHTERS
IN NEW YORK

What streets, what taxis, transport them
over bridges & speed bumps—my daughters swift

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!

(from Ten Thousand Good Mornings, Carnegie Mellon University Press)

James Reiss's most recent book of poems is Riff on Six: New and Selected Poems (Salt Publishing: Cambridge, UK, 2003). His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He is Professor of English at Miami University in Ohio, as well as Editor Emeritus of Miami University Press.