This upcoming Monday, November 12, at 7:30 p.m. poet Wayne Miller will be reading his award winning poems in Buckley Center 163. Miller is the author of three poetry collections: The City, Our City (Milkweed, 2011)—which was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award and the Rilke Prize—The Book of Props (2009), and Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006). He also translated Moikom Zeqo’s I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA, 2007) and co-edited both New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008) and Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master (Pleiades Unsung Masters, 2011). The recipient of six Poetry Society of America Awards, the Bess Hokin Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Wayne lives in Kansas City and teaches at the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing (& Reviews). In 2013 he will be the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar of Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Belfast. Below are a few of his poems to entice you to attend the reading on Monday. See you there!
Nocturne
Tonight all the leaves are paper spoons
in a broth of wind. Last week
they made a darker sky below the sky.
The houses have swallowed their colors,
and each car moves in the blind sack
of its sound like the slipping of water.
Flowing means falling very slowly—
the river passing under the tracks,
the tracks then buried beneath the road.
When a knocking came in the night,
I rose violently toward my reflection
hovering beneath this world. And then
the fluorescent kitchen in the window
like a page I was reading—a face
coming into focus behind it:
my neighbor locked out of his own party,
looking for a phone. I gave him
a beer and the lit pad of numbers
through which he disappeared; I found
I was alone with the voices that bloomed
as he opened the door. It’s time
to slip my body beneath the covers,
let it fall down the increments of shale,
let the wind consume every spoon.
My voice unhinging itself from light,
my voice landing in its cradle—.
How terrifying a payphone is
hanging at the end of its cord.
Which is not to be confused with sleep—
sleep gives the body back its mouth.
–Wayne Miller, from The Book of Props (2009
Nude Asleep in the Tub
As if she were something opened —
like a pocket watch — her body slipped beneath a surface
peeled back to reveal its surface —
drops of air clinging to her thighs
like roe. Outside, the snow pressed down against the city’s
rooftops; a frozen shirt on the clothesline hung slack,
no longer cracked and whipped by the wind. And the window
just a slide of silence — its slip into evening measured
in drips from the tap. I found I was alone with her body —
refracted and clarified — water breathing with her breath.
What could I do but watch the lightwebs lambently drift
along the walls? — as if the room’s edges radiated
from her, as if I were inside her thought. But then,
even before this could register, the clothesline creaked
and the wind picked up, and she stirred, so the water
broke from her into water.
–Wayne Miller, from The Book of Props (2009)
Winter Pastoral
Not enough snow to cover the landscape,
just enough to hover beneath it—
the far hills etched into paper,
the City floating upward
through the falling. Across the avenue
a light comes on, its room
a space the mind breathes into,
while here, snow
brushes the cold window,
the night slipping steadily past.
The sound of the wind—but the wind
has no sound, we hear
only the vibrations
of whatever it touches. How silent
this room would be
without the creaking trees, the flutelike
eaves, the poorly fitted sash stiles.
Love,
when I kiss your sleeping body,
it’s like one flake landing
in a snowfield: brief contact—
which becomes part of the field.
—Wayne Miller, The City, Our City (2011)