TIM MILLER’s latest book of poetry, Time and the River: From Columbine to the Invention of Fire, was just published by S4N Books. His poetry has appeared in Crannóg, Southword, Londongrip, Forgotten Ground Regained, and others across the US and UK. He is online at wordandsilence.com and can be heard on the poetry podcast Human Voices Wake Us.

London, 1943

She grew plants in her room all through the war,

she moved her books into the sitting room

and surrounded herself with plants that shook

during the Blitz as they climbed their trellises,

shook in their pots or smoothed themselves between

her fingers on nights when she wrote to him,

fingering philodendron after each

sentence and sometimes the entire night,

when there was nothing or too much to say.

She wrote about slicing matches in half

to conserve them, and the bombed cricket pitch,

of running out of cooking fat and eggs

and how proud she was of her dirty hands

and the days she spent at the factory.

She promised him that when the war was done

she would wrap herself in his overcoat,

the coat that was the war to him, the coat

that carried him across the continent.

She knew that if she found some real silk hose

it would drive him mad, that and a midnight blue

Rayon dress – but to touch his olive coat,

belted behind, and tug at his loose tie,

wide and patterned beneath his graying beard –

that would mean the end of the war for her.

Their letters to each other ended with

the same verses from Billie Holiday’s

“Solitude,” and if one of them was killed

they promised to hide in each instrument –

buried in the bass and in Billie’s voice,

buried in the trumpet and piano –

for the other to find and listen to.

But somehow she knew they would both survive

to dance to that song together, surrounded

in this room by her wide leaves, the full moon

no longer a danger and his body

gone so long from her life – and now just there.

So she also knew that by then the song

wouldn’t be about them anymore but

all the war dead they hadn’t acknowledged,

all buried in the inflection of the

tenor saxophone, and the soft mercy

in the drums, finally mercy and rest,

the kind of rest neither of them would know

until the memory of an old song

made them wonder what it was all about,

they had been so busy living again.

Shtetl, 1803

This siddur is for travelers, it’s tiny,

and I still use it when I return home

since even there I am passing through.

I carry this book the same way I bring

bread – by horseback, train, or on the river –

I lug around these crumbs with my warm book

and after a morning selling hand mills

and tableware, boots and chess sets and combs,

I find a corner table in Frankfurt,

I find a window wherever I am,

and that’s my only chance to pray. I can’t

bow or sing or gesture in such a place,

but I do read and I do sway slightly,

and since I was made to leave yeshiva

it must be enough. It’s not where I rest

but it’s when I can stop, still unsettled,

and I have this siddur, I have my bread.

In the morning, people buy what I have,

or they don’t – silks, shoelaces, paper, scarves –

and then I steal some minutes in Breslau,

steal the vivid and true habits of life

in Warsaw or Brody, bits of regret

wrestled away and handed over to

bread and prayer and companionless silence,

thick bread and a thick book carried for miles,

the only order I can hope to keep.

Notes to ‘Shetl 1803’

Shtetl: Yiddish for a market town in Eastern Europe

Siddur: A Jewish prayerbook

Yeshiva: While this a general term for a Jewish school, in the context of the poem (Eastern Europe, late 18th/early 19th century), it refers specifically to those schools started by members of Hasidism, itself a new (and beleaguered) movement within Judaism at the time

Cleveland, 1988

I remember him in his Celtics coat,

one of the other dads at Saturday

morning basketball games. I seem to see

him in the hall near the gymnasium,

back by the kitchen where the old women

sold popcorn and soda and snacks, or with

the crowd around the court – parents, siblings,

or the look of new kids from across town

that often came with the visiting team.

He was tall and he always wore that green coat,

and he looked so much like Kevin McHale –

that’s the name I want to use now – and if

you wanted you could follow his green shape

all the way from the snowy entrance off

the parking lot, past the ticket-taker,

around the court of maybe a hundred

adults and kids all gathered for the squeals

of sneakers on the floor, the ref’s whistle

and the drama of what mattered so much:

grade school, late eighties, Saturday morning.

The more I write about him in this way

the more I seem to see him as a ghost,

and it was only twenty years later

that I heard he was a narcotics cop,

that he’d been under investigation

and had shot himself in front of the chief.

I instantly remembered those mornings

and wondered if anyone else did, too,

his shape heavy and loitering in our

memories like the restless dead, regret

somewhere back there, some decision the snow

or hallways or hunched walk of a tall man

gave no hint of. Was guilt on his shoulders

even then? I don’t know, I was caught up

playing myself, and never very good,

proud of my first pair of Nikes and the

scuff marks, like this ink, that they left behind.