by Farid Matuk
Praise for The Real Horse
“Book as ‘gelatin silver print.’ Book as ‘blurry pink mouth.’ Kiss the book. ‘Delay the form.’ Form as ‘carport,’ beneath which the ‘day’s region of objects’ glitter for a few moments, then dissolve. Farid Matuk has written a book of this sort. I read it forever beneath the trees where the horses are. The ‘real horse,’ that is. A book that retrains us how to bear proximities. Book as ‘finite resistances’: the ‘citrus fields’ but also a ‘lit cigarette’ that flares above it, the ‘precisest’ feeling. Or touch.”
—Bhanu Kapil
“As in the illusion of animal locomotion through the slots of a nineteenth-century zoetrope, Farid Matuk’s The Real Horse animates discontinuities of sight and ensuing sound from the historical vault: subjects of social fascination, bodies of the landed and deracinated, fugitives of racial brutality. Lines engender ambient occasions, course surfaces, and a frontier diminishment enacted as present personhood, pushed into forms of ‘a real outlaw daughter’—into dissociative voices of inheritance.”
—Roberto Tejada
“I read The Real Horse out loud, in one gulp, and I felt provoked, moved, dazzled, and shaken by its relentless, bone-stirring energy where the terror and care of parenting traverse landscapes haunted by militarized states, racial orders, and family narratives of migration and undocumentation from Syria to the Andes to California. ‘The coast is exploding,’ writes Matuk, and, as it explodes, he births this life-archive for his daughter to find like a secret treasure in the future. Read this cherished book to wake up, to plow through the poetics of demented nationhood, to reimagine the networks that define us.”
—Daniel Borzutzky
THE REAL HORSE
Camino del Sol
A Latina and Latino Literary Series
The Real Horse
POEMS
Farid Matuk
The University of Arizona Press
www.uapress.arizona.edu
© 2018 by Farid Matuk
All rights reserved. Published 2018
ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3734-1 (paper)
Cover design by Leigh McDonald
Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Matuk, Farid, author.
Title: The real horse : poems / Farid Matuk.
Other titles: Camino del sol.
Description: Tucson : The University of Arizona Press, 2018. | Series: Camino del sol : a Latina and Latino literary series
Identifiers: LCCN 2017042849 | ISBN 9780816537341 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: | LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3613.A8756 A6 2018 | DDC 811/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042849
Printed in the United States of America
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Who should the poet’s voice be for?
—Roque Dalton
For a daughter among the navigators, among the names.
CONTENTS
[Dear daughter]
Your Instructions
A Daughter Having Been of the Type
A Daughter the Real Horse
A Daughter That She May Touch the Deployments
No Address
Notes
Acknowledgments
The Real Horse
Dear daughter,
We really did sit in the playground at your school this summer listening to cicadas drone loopy and sly. In my head they sounded like professionals narrating their work into online performance reviews, like lovers or sex workers narrating their sex into phone cameras. Out loud we wondered if their noise might fold the distance in the background into something that would reach us.
I don’t know when you’ll read this, but I started these poems as a way to see you even before you arrived, anxious about how the body we gave you would bear power’s projections. I’m simple, so it took me a long time to recognize the circle I was making. I thought I could write something you could use, but you already resist the orders, displacing generation from genealogy, paternity from ownership.
Otherwise, I’m just trying to keep up with your natural-born solutions to the problem called space that here is said to come large and without mercy. This “first world” would be valued for counting us—patriated or natural-born—among its circumstantial few. You show me that even if the outlines of our circumstance burn without consequence, we can tend at once to the plain moment and to material things and to the projections they bear.
Someone is always poised to compare that tending to the cicadas’ hum, saying it drones out reason or that it tries to fill the gap between estranged things with a self-positioning song. That’s okay, because maybe our tending is already figured in a favorite book’s title that says Life in a Box is a Pretty Life.
I mean, maybe it’s on us to make it ugly, or even prettier, or to see that it’s always also some other way. I don’t know, but I don’t think we’re in the box alone or practicing the same contortions.
Some of us get out all the time, riding what?
Maybe the best thing to do outside is litter the panorama, interrupting the idea of roaming an expanse without end.
I’ve been reading about performance artist Tehching Hsieh; he was undocumented in the 1980s, like me. I was the age you are now when Hsieh came to this country to braid art into life by committing to the frame of the made thing. In that frame, when he tried to get free, he went into a cage. When he escaped time, he punched a clock on the hour. When he spoke, he made sure a friend sealed the tapes that recorded his words.
You and Hsieh make me wonder if freedom might be neither public nor private, if what sometimes gets called the aesthetic might be happiest at war not with material things but with the anesthetic.
Where does opposition go after it frames our beautiful camaraderie? I’m learning from you that we can stay, unrushed in our figuring.
Where these poems are something like sonnets, I’m trying to draw the box a song makes in the air, a box into which we can turn away. Maybe that’s a space where we come together as one another’s occasions, not in relation, but in service with a little s, in service to the little things you say to twist or wipe away the track of the next minute.
Inside, I took out what punctuation I could to make more room for you.
Your Instructions
you are somebody else
who didn’t know me ever
pretend that but I was going
to be here next to you and the horse
walked between us really
slow but really and then a fire came
and didn’t hurt anybody
but only the horse forgot about it
then I’ll tell you what the words said
the shadow was a plane pretend that
when you take your face out of the water
but then you have to take the water out of the bowl
with you like that dream I only ever had two dreams
but then I was at Pump It Up with all my friends
A Daughter Having Been of the Type
Popular in the eighteenth century across Spain’s viceroyalties, sets of casta paintings rendered in each panel a mother, father, and child with a caption that labeled the type such breeding vectored: De mestizo e India, nace coyote. De indio y cambuja, nace lobo torna atrás.
Popular in California through the second half of
the nineteenth century, studio and field photographs (taken in Sacramento, unspecified, Los Angeles, Bodie, unspecified . . .) documented those condemned within and without the law. Mounted on card stock, they were sold or traded as keepsakes.
In 1857 Juan Flores and his men killed Sheriff James Barton and most of his posse in the hills outside Los Angeles. The accusation that “La Chola” Martina Espinoza tampered with the Barton posse’s guns moved landed white and Californio men together to lynch poor brown men. The only known photograph of Espinoza, a street portrait, was taken late in her long life and under a bright sun.
having been raised in friends
sailing up the river to the world so far the wrong way
a tidal bore as an actuary wave brings a girl etched at the prow
bearing shining hospitality we told her to
and do you come to learn you are following appetites we trail
through a tribe somewhere called a claim to life
if you exceed the world refusing categories
and the emancipatory projects these prescribe
we’re playing a game called a game or pledge of resistance
where a boy speaks fast at the pizza stand more available to be seen
the young in their concerns amid the old artifice nonstop
letting go the signs thrown up above their heads along the West Coast
liquid kids displayed right at the edge of a voice
comes a fold careless of time bearing everything besides
having ordered our faces into types by the planes
water cuts into stones or by furloughed light
that visits purpling the sheer sides of Cascadia
Saddleback Cordillera Andes Jabal Bahra
light that visits animals sleeping fearless
and afeared our grain of fur
in outlines laid at the fingertips of settlers
indolence they said having issued from a mestizo
in names in love with an Indian hardly capable
of managing a territory or a coyote’s face
pushed into form aside property
by how many degrees and of what
how could this be about freedom
that a coyote go turn in its type
a daughter Juan Flores curled onto my chest
a daughter plein air
a mother archive erasure
a daughter durable good durable history
a daughter over the throwing
a father blacken the hills
a father high and tight
a father reservoir of poses
good foot
sure shot glory sign without doubt
greaser horse thief
albumen print
a daughter handle their guns
gelatin silver print
preformatted postcard paper
running blurry pink mouth
a mother commercial surf pop echo
a daughter shout pouch
a father rendered by or under the inspection of
mestizo castizo coyote lobo versino
a mother waste not want
a region of objects
photo plate 12
a daughter sell the shadow
caddisflies
a daughter unblushing
a mother rhyolite
a daughter turn away the night
a daughter her own sex
a daughter her fumbling
a daughter mission
delay the form
courtesy of
a mother not a lane
a father the empty highways
the farms to market
a daughter tucked under my chin
a daughter watching streetlights
carte de visite
funny name
a mother thirty-thousand-foot view
panorama nostalgia ghost
mineral depression
a daughter vitamin free
a father crystal mane
a mother amber leaf light
a father hole within the hole
a daughter twelve-sail cruiser
or we could go mirrored upon the face of the waters that bear loose slide surfboards
shaped for this break or upon the plains where winds arrange those who aspire to a safe room
those who fall off the beat those who fall off the sad feeling in the story of Ellington
arranging a confidence from your ear like believe we were good having gone this far from Peru
from my dad beating her into foreign reaches my mother with her sisters cleared
refugees from the country of women cruising with our bad taste inside we were illegal
on paper then say we were a patriated glory borne faster upon the face of the waters
checking our miracles against the stories of a usable past going off in drunk songs
in right-to-work uniforms exponentially articulated going all around even in the English sound
of the names brought on us dick-nosed bearded swill buckets we were what shouldn’t matter
to you now already gone the lantana generating at your feet so proud rightly of your chaos
of your trumpets chambered in carports gilding the day’s region of objects
but will you come to say for yourself as some say as a sign and claim to getting over
in an echoing true name something like I am an American artist
and still the question may come did the landed come to your mothers’ beds
masked in the busy snouts of animals or were they born that way
do you get to follow them back
say it’s not like that it gets kinda rough
on the back of the horse in the back of our limousine sailing
as real across a sea why wouldn’t we expect another desert
out the windshield quinoa amber light fronds wave up the hill and back
up dancers raise stockinged knees to the left describe the world
new romantics sing precisely of women and pictures inside me
our grown heads against the glass like Saint Sebastians
displayed under a moon that petrifies we went loping snout free
fuzzed out the night the Pacific went louder
every tree a channel to talk in eucalyptus peels
that lined the road in eucalyptus oil unblushing at wildfire
and salt blew back an orange was feeding you reaching up peppermint
tea fog against your mother’s ribs against the door hung
so possible now your long feet walk a new topography down the lane
run to catch up fog turn away the night
night turn away the moon
moon turn away so we can see it
lamp in the night could be a name for each Syrian hill poised along my mother’s line
now burning and my landed greed’s love wishes you a right to rest in any country’s dust
no matter the habits or confusions or what jellyfish washed ashore might think of you
animal
oyster
roe
beef
wrapped in a warm feeling fearing you the prophet in his glory needed to know
what a people said about him outside still water and doe piss and reed straws
sucking the lagoon up inside themselves to share in life a people says
sprinkle the unused words to the bottom a people says we are as good
as each feather tip of brush grass reaching into the wind this coast is exploding
all over the waves leaves are hungry I can tell you about it I’m trying to not forget
the lyric part the noise you’ll welcome as a twin the faster cymbals ringing
all down the hill the ocean swills in from the south one wave by the
arch rock
the next on its shoulder and so on to the point the point lifts them up
there are holy women somewhere alive with your techne with your name
Mary meant “of the sea” even if pictures don’t hold anyone still
cement pipe cover painted blue shattered peels of blue paint in the grass
and Andean hills seemed quiet forever should we call our names to a moon gone slicing
a meter from the mountain that left my dad trying to be a dad by owning us
that left him rendered by or under the inspection of colonial art academies reaching
through generations in lightfast oil paints do I let what can leave the house as a type
called “Cheese of all the milks” “Suspended in midair” or “Taking a step back”
from whiteness going low three coyotes hump down the valley deep in peeled exteriors
in the hay dust come to see scrub brush scents the path of what fire will be called
alongside a shoulder remembers itself from its impressions newly in the photographs
I look for local kill sites Sacramento then unspecified then us sweat
straw smell heavy stage curtains not what was said in the nose or on the good foot
everything is leaving upon the face of the waters gone so far into a next name
if we’re fish baskets when caulked with sedge caddisflies sweet flag
