Carl Boon
My Daughter and the Whale
My daughter at three declared
one Wednesday afternoon
that she would make a story out of plastic.
A patient, fearless child, she claimed
that she could see the whole of Istanbul
through her bedroom window: the faces
of the dock-workers circling Ambarlı,
her grandmother’s tea-cups,
her menagerie of animals made real
inside the weaving trees at Gülhane.
I, unused to bravery, feared
the contours of her being in the world,
her imagination larger than mine,
her belief that clouds and lamps
were evil, out to get her. But that Friday
it rose from her unscarred hands: a story.
A girl-whale stuck in a river, a purple,
powerful, sad animal whose body
was too large for the surrounding world,
whose skin made signs on the soil.
What signs? I asked, but she couldn’t see;
only the top, she said, only what
the world surmised of girls who swam
and then got lost. I wanted more,
continuation and some climax,
but all she did was sit on the carpet,
making tiny fish instead of whales,
lost again in her wishes for chocolate
and a glass of milk. Our children’s tales
end abruptly, for we fail to see
their wrists twitch when they sleep,
their warnings to the outside world. We
are strangers to them; we aren’t whales
or even their approximations. We are
barely alive in the world we made.
one Wednesday afternoon
that she would make a story out of plastic.
A patient, fearless child, she claimed
that she could see the whole of Istanbul
through her bedroom window: the faces
of the dock-workers circling Ambarlı,
her grandmother’s tea-cups,
her menagerie of animals made real
inside the weaving trees at Gülhane.
I, unused to bravery, feared
the contours of her being in the world,
her imagination larger than mine,
her belief that clouds and lamps
were evil, out to get her. But that Friday
it rose from her unscarred hands: a story.
A girl-whale stuck in a river, a purple,
powerful, sad animal whose body
was too large for the surrounding world,
whose skin made signs on the soil.
What signs? I asked, but she couldn’t see;
only the top, she said, only what
the world surmised of girls who swam
and then got lost. I wanted more,
continuation and some climax,
but all she did was sit on the carpet,
making tiny fish instead of whales,
lost again in her wishes for chocolate
and a glass of milk. Our children’s tales
end abruptly, for we fail to see
their wrists twitch when they sleep,
their warnings to the outside world. We
are strangers to them; we aren’t whales
or even their approximations. We are
barely alive in the world we made.
Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007 and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.