My Daughter Already Knows All the Words
by Jack B. Bedell
It’s the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the week and the kids have piled into the car to head home from school. Book bags are already open to grab homework and I’m halfway into my son about his World History grade, autospewing stuff my dad used to lay on me about how hanging out with knuckleheads makes you a knucklehead and how life is an EFFORT game and how you are what the numbers say you are and that what you think about yourself won’t buy water.
The car is just driving itself west on 190 while I’m spewing, and all my old CDs are throwing old songs around the car that hang in the air like smells you can’t even notice anymore when my daughter makes the first sound I’ve heard all day that wasn’t mine.
“Every day I wake up we drink a lot of coffee and watch the CNN/
Every day I wake up to a bowl of clover honey and let the locusts fly in.”
It’s Clutch, and she’s 11 singing along, adding fractions in her math notebook.
“Every time I look out my window same three dogs looking back at me/
Every time I open my windows cranes fly in to terrorize me/
The power of the Holy Ghost/
The power of the Holy Ghost.”
Just letting words out like breath.
And I realize there’s so many words I WANT to teach her that aren’t these. Like how to say “no” so people hear it, how to say “I love you” without it meaning “I owe you.” I don’t want her picking words out of the air because they’re hanging there. I want her to choose carefully, to HEAR and to OWN.
And I want her to be able to say “okay” and mean it. To know the difference between asking and praying.
“Oh this burning beard, I have come undone./
It’s just as I feared. I have, I have come undone.”
And my son with his knucklehead friends and his grades and the way he just knows he’s the smartest thing in the car and my old man telling his old man all this same stuff—she knows this song, too. Heard it every day without having to listen. I just hope it’ll come out different when she starts singing it.
Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s work has appeared in Southern Review, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain, and other journals. His latest collection is Color All Maps New (Mercer University Press, February 2021). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.
