June 19, 2017

David Miller

HANG FLOAT BURN BURY

a. Things that hang:
– Yarcombe Vancouver
– the gardens of Babylon
– Ithaca on its rocky perch
– the morning star
– at a turn in a stream
– steelhead trout in their surge congregate
– like blackberries in the wet heat of July
– cheesecloth sweating
– goat milk
– straw and black streaks in my daughter’s hair
– the discourse between
– bow
– arrow
– breath
– glass opening its feathers
– on impact
– wheels on a ruptured axle
– tires from a stainless steel hook
– in a gym ceiling
– resting on air like albatrosses
– her blue-black hair braided down her spine
– rickety but brilliant theater marquees
– blood in the neck
– blood in the eyes, in the tongue
– lips feet hands
– the blue, blue head
– the skin empty of soul

b. Things that float:
– Whatever has been drowned
– light and dust in an empty room
– bread, apples, cider, gravy
– my daughter’s arms and legs on the pool’s bright skin
– uncertain winds and currents
– the smell of brake fluid and burnt steel
– smelting tin
– our trust in God
– the bottle with the MS, half-blurred by salt
– a creeping riot of
– swimmers in a river’s current
– hair around dieffenbachia
– the bellies of middle-aged men in summer lakes
– gossip and its inconsistencies
– the weight and the chain
– the song of the sirens
– alligators with their double-skinned eyes
– conversations in dreams
– feathering atop the dusty air
– suicides and weather balloons
– public opinion and crises
– churches, lead, ducks, mothers
– whatever refuses to stay drowned

c. Things that burn:
– Hot Cheetos
– the sealant around a car gasket
– a bullet wound
– the tips of braids while bored in geometry
– the hills outside La Canada
– water when my brother boils it
– Pan Am Flight 102,
– over the brick-and-shingle houses of Lockerbie
– smoke in the green Georgia night
– boiling up from burning tires
– the ash that drowned Pompeii and Herculaneum
– the steel joists of the World Trade Center (at varying rates)
– the morning sky over Sodom and Gomorrah
– Dido
– the synagogues on the edge of Sobibor
– desecrated crosses
– cattle-brands
– my daughter’s bones
– my Soul

d. Things that are buried:
– the Soul
– applause, the sustain of a violoncello, adoration
– the music of Ma Rainey and Sleepy John Estes
– the fire in my daughter’s high
– cheekbones, so high, so crisp
– the catechism in her smile
– my first dog, in the sleeping bag he tore apart
– gray paths through broad hills and
– the straw-and-black limbs of trees
– frozen earth and bottles of Yuengling
– broken cement, splinters of smelt
– loopholes
– the cyanotic waters of the Monongahela
– under feathers of ice
– my daughter’s laughter as she hung onto Pokemon Go!
– my daughter’s eyes when fear or exhaustion burned them
– my daughter’s songs firing up dark January mornings
– strange fruit of American rhetoric
– rag torn from Justice’s eyes
– the Hanging Gardens of Babylon
– compassion

from Rattle #55, Spring 2017

__________

David Miller: “Another year of teaching Latin, another year I will have to tell my students how to behave among white people at Latin conventions, at the Getty, at plays. It is always difficult to do. I do not know whether I make a difference by doing that. It is like the advice we give our own children to help them survive the world. This poem is a reflection of that uncertainty, of the pain of loss and the ambivalence of time.” (twitter)

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March 13, 2016

David Miller

ELEGY

America, I just don’t know anymore
I came to your house; the front door hung open; inside were paper
hats and sweet Kentucky whiskey; the walls streaked with red and
blue hand prints; confetti carpeted the floor; the t.v. sang to me;
the radios, too
America, I heard your dogs growling, golden retrievers,
America, I want a place to live, I want to play in unmarbled snow,
I scoot through hallways, voices sometimes bleat or shine through
the walls, LED-whitened, nothing is ever dark enough
America, my phone calls to me, a voice from another room,
footsteps in the rain-worsted night, tells me to hush, to love,
Everthings goina be awright, it snarls,
America, am I going crazy? America, are you yowling at me?
America, when did Nancy Reagan grow old? How was she still alive?
America, you make no sense to me—when did you start bleaching your hair?
when did you start wearing blue and brown? Why do you dye your eyes?
Where is the flat white light my television has promised?
The picture so clear, the darkness so deep?
Why have you become so black
and white, America? I drive to school, I teach Caesar and virtue,
my students are ochre, ecru, pink, cinnamon, carmelized Cabernet,
the long leaf wrapping of a Romeo y Julieta, the last sip of morning
coffee just touched by half-and-half, the crust of cheese on my wife’s
bibingka (so sweet, so pliable), why have you ignored the rest of us,
America?
Some say you taste of sauerbraten and winter beer,
but I hear the faint rustle of banana leaves,
of sentences that only at their ornate ends erupt into meaning,
like old Cicero’s fevered speeches,
or the slow-download of Mishima’s novels.
America, you are a mask, worn down to gold: you hide yourself well
by dancing, by political debate that rubs your arms against mine,
your legs against mine, that open to me, like the the sun to the flat
earth, spinning around, engulfing me in a you
I once dreamed—
This is what you promised me,
America, in eighth grade,
Mrs. Tidemacher told me of the American dream,
she said you were rubies and sapphires,
she said you were Tarzan and Giant Robot,
she said you were a poor peanut farmer turned governor
she said in America, even a failed movie actress could become first lady

I heard you crying, I ran through the abandoned fields
and across the broken onramps, the fences with their hems
of grocery bags, the eyes of abandoned houses, bruised
or silent in the beyond, I ran when I heard you crying
like a phone, no one told me how alone you are,
I reassured myself, I said you were Christmas snow
and familiar sitcoms, the smell of a wife’s hair, a husband’s
shaving cream, I was almost asleep when I found you
not crying, but laughing, wiping your boot off
the spray can on its side, the paint sloughing down
the side of my house: Brotherhood In Christ.

America, I have come to bury you, not to praise you
I want to see whether you stay buried, or how long you will stumble
about in the off-brown wheat, or by blue-green rice paddies, or in
all the colors you used to wear (Joseph is looking for his coat
somewhere, tell him not to come, he won’t be allowed here),
I want to see who lays the last bullet in your head

America, I’ve awoken
I am rage, I am sorrow,
America, I just don’t know
what I am to you anymore.

Poets Respond
March 13, 2016

[download audio]

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David Miller: “This poem comes from the recent death of Nancy Reagan, from everyone calling her a great lady. She was; she terrified me.” (website)

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