Posted on by Tim Miller

Three poems by Tim Miller

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.

Posted on by Tim Miller · 1 Comment

A Severed Head

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.

The Great Year takes place a few centuries from now as a handful of people journey from eastern Europe to Iceland after the world has been decimated by war and environmental collapse. As they go, and in the manner of a post-apocalyptic Canterbury Tales, the survivors take turns telling stories. One of these survivors is a severed and magically-preserved head named John who occasionally recites poetry of his own. His first two songs are gnomic and ecstatic and don’t need any context.  The third narrates how he met another survivor, a man named Smith (also his occupation). The fourth song, coming near the end of the book, describes John’s affection for his friends that he has travelled with for so long. 

The poet can be heard reading the following poem here

A Severed Head’s First Song

See what my eyes see –

   why do I need a body?

I see a man’s head

   placed in a hazel tree

and the poisoned blood it drips

   rips the tree in three –

why do I need a body?

I see a saint beheaded

   and watch milk instead of blood

flow with white ferocity –

   why do I need a body?

I see a warrior

   fishing for the serpent

that surrounds the world,

   and the line that he unfurled

(this tendency is innate)

is hooked with an ox’s head for bait –

   what high comedy! –

why do I need a body?

I see a mother in her ecstasy  

   mistake her son for a lion

and tear him completely apart:

   and with her mind utterly beyond

she put his head on a thyrsus wand

   for the sake of deepest Mystery –

why do I need a body?

I have ridden with the cavalry

   I have participated in atrocity

I have clogged the flesh-clogged axletree

   with the debris of my enemy,

and I have offloaded it all

   into the waters and soured the sea –

why do I need a body?

I have seen heads on platters

   and heads in pictures

painted in plaster upon the wall:

   they have been called omens and prodigies

and their poetry is a poverty,

   a malady and endless litany,

damned without a body

   to only see and see and see –

why do I need a body?

I have seen the great loom

   set up in the crowded room

and I saw the loom get going –

   and the weights on that loom

that were in the great room

   were the heads of women and men,

and mine was among them.

   There are only visions,

endless echo and revelation,

   and I cannot flee –

why do I need a body?

A Severed Head’s Second Song

I dreamt of two reeds growing

   two stalks blowing

that I wanted to keep from harm –

   but a strong arm

tore them from the ground

   and from their roots I found

that blood would not stop dripping,

   even when they were put on a plate –

and I was told to eat and celebrate.

I dreamt that two hawks flew from my hand

   and finding no food they flew to the land

of Hel to ask for meat from the dead –

   but somehow a table was spread

and I ate those hawks’ hearts dipped in honey,

   blood and bee’s treasure an awful money.

I dreamt of a ring wrapped in wolf’s hair

   and when I wore it I was well,

because I went home, home to Hel,

   where the graves open and the dripping dead tell

what has not happened yet –

   the god in the net, the lover not met,

the grudge and blood born of debt –

   Hel an ink-well where the ink is mead

and where all need has died, and the need for greed,

   only strong drink and the Book to read.

I dreamt of an old woman –

   but don’t we all –

and she said to burn the chickweed

   growing round the hall.

And the old woman pestered me

   all summer long

saying the hall would burn with it,

   an awful double song.

I didn’t listen to the old woman –

   but none of us ever do –

and when the grey horses came

   the man stopped there and threw

flames everywhere and all:

   and he lit it first in that weed

until the hall was gone

   and its ashes like black seed.

A Severed Head’s Third Song

It was me,

   like a nest of bees

covered in a hood –

   and suddenly this blasphemy

revealed on the table,

   preserved and wrapped in rosemary

My head

   of soliloquy and sorcery and serenity

and my eyes

   for the first time on Smith –

what a myth

   what a tale and a story

to meet with this tapestry

   this effigy of centuries

this mind of masonry

I was only a trick

   to that old soothsayer

and he only won me

   as some curiosity,

not for my ability, no,

   he wanted simplicity, not eternity,

not the ferocity and calamity,

   not the anxiety of true augury,

of seeing beyond, and far between

   of seeing beyond, and far beneath

not one season but them all

   not one shock but every fall

not one height but the constant climb

   not one word but every rhyme

not one season, not the one that’s near,

   but all of them, the great year

and I knew Smith would be with me

   each our own devotee

on land or on sea,

   and through cruelty and atrocity

through the litany of history

   through poverty and glad obscurity,

I knew he would take me with him

   and that’s why I asked to be given away

to be put on a platter, put on a tray,

   to be presented to this friend

whose heart I could perhaps mend,

   poetry and prophecy the cure

for the heartache that will not end,

   the two of us one strange tree

tending to our shared roots and mysteries.

A Severed Head’s Last Song

My head still holds

   its eyes of oak,

and these tired eyes

   have been my yoke

for much too long –

If I could stop –

   stop somewhere

with you four

   and live somewhere

and close the door,

   and put my tools aside –

my boat of words and my loom

   my knot of words

and the timbered room

   where each plank is a song

that only I can sing,

   words given flight

and songs given wings –

   How I would rather cling

to calm and love and rest

   I would rather snip the string

and feel our long calm blessed –

But then I see more melted gold

   then I see more mountains in flame

then I see the new become old

   and all the earth washed in smoke

and like a story told and retold

   in the voice of the multitude

every portent loosens its hold

   and every eye is ringed with flame

and the pillars of smoke topple down

   and the mountain is a torn gown

split down the middle and smoking

   and with every image, I drown.