Bittersweet

Monday morning, well, uhmm, back to school?

2012-05-14T07:01:31-04:00

Reading Circle Heather Ross Miller I went to school, learned Bob and Nancy, Mac and Muff. My daughter goes, learns Sally, Dick, and Jane, and Spot and Puff. Then Tim the teddy, Oh, my Tim! cries Sally in her little overalls and tam, My Tim! My Tam! I am! I am! Now the circle sighs and fits itself into softer chairs, a lounge, a rocker, Old Fashioneds on a tray, whiskey bitters sugar water maraschino. Read books with sex and politics, incontinent Bob, withered Nancy, Mac and Muff gone to bone. While Sally, Dick, and Jane never come home, Spot and Puff lying around arthritic, deaf, and blind. Only Tim, true Tim, remains behind, one ear gone, his button eyes dull as time lost in arithmetic.

I think I'm taking an exam in American lit.

2012-05-02T07:31:22-04:00

Captain Heather Ross Miller He knew whales more than a wife, a little boy. Knew a leg of white oak: white peg white whale - and his ship’s rolling mad pursuit. His knee, his foot, consumed by the beast, blood, bone, both gone to make a fish grown strong. He would have this back, he would. Watching the horizon, the scattered stars, troubling his crew, knowing they muttered, he still could wait. And when the whale rose, in a foam as white as wool, he knew his truest love, Una, Jezebel, back home in her window, sweetest, unpredictable, and pure.

Too easy, I know, Virginia and Eddy. But couldn't stop it.

2012-04-27T10:29:13-04:00

The Giving of Care Heather Ross Miller Upon his shivering and delicate girl-wife, he spread his plebeian overcoat, old cadet of the lost batallion, unfortunate boyish infantry. And on top of that, their drowsy friendly cat. The fur tickled her chin, and she grinned, eyes shut, the lids he could see trembling. Love, dearest love, an armful, a heartful, you are good to me. Then she died. And he remembered her singing, the piano so out of tune, the eerie eerie ringing of strings and mellow chords through the January gloom, the chords of her throat swelling, and still she sang on and on for him, until her blood ran down her chin.

Hey, mind if I rejoin you all? Have been away so long..

2012-04-15T10:36:27-04:00

Baking a cake takes courage. Like making a poem.

2012-04-10T08:35:59-04:00

Seven-Minute Frosting Heather Ross Miller One cold and windy day, I made us a devil’s food cake, swirled seven-minute frosting between the layers, all around the sides, crowning the top, inches of luscious vanilla, light and sweet as the love of God, seven-minute frosting hard to get right. I put it in the pantry to surprise you later. Then forgot to adjust the damper, until a strong down draft blew it wide, black dust settling over the kitchen, through the pantry, our perfect cake, Vesuvius, Mt. St. Helens, sacred Fujiyama. I never told you. Somewhere in the pines creatures came to eat cake baked of soot and egg white, a gritty sweet to slake wild tongues. While I, the drudge to wipe and sweep, heard myself weep for a lost and perfect seven minutes.

Bit nostalgic here, holding on to something.

2012-04-06T07:45:07-04:00

Good Friday Heather Ross Miller Dressed in her heels, my mother rode the oily bus to Albemarle to buy neccessaries for my Easter dress. Yellow voile pale as pollen, buttons like hearts of pearl, white valentines across my back, white smockings across my front. She held my hand so hard, I sweated, Stay still, she warned, Don’t let go. But I did, and we were both the better. Today the thin green gauze of April clothes me as richly as the voile, the smockings and buttons, the slow quiet tattings of lace. She braided dark hair back from my face, long and thick and wild as animals, tying me off in yellow ribbon. She knew Jesus might rise again, take her home with him, and me holding her hand.

A little bit of Palm Sunday crept in between the sheets this morning...

2012-04-01T18:04:52-04:00

All Glory Once again, we enter Jerusalem on an ass, waving, letting our tears fall like ash when our friends lay down their weary palms along our path. We know it can only last a little while before the stomach turns. What we like and what we don’t come and go, heat and fog. The ass keeps his pace. All this will be remembered. All true love. Dark hours of hate will slide past us quickly; Ahead on our journey, we will overtake them.

Palm Sunday, wafting mild and warm, nostalgia.

2012-04-01T09:47:10-04:00

Basket Heather Ross Miller We actually kept our newborn in a woven willow basket, and it cradled her just fine, smelling of fresh washed and sun-dried diapers, a hint of pecan trees out back. You know how fragile pecan shells look, pale tan with the black line so delicate and stark, and you know how quickly they crack. Our child, though delicate and pale, slept and thrived, those small fists like starfish, determined, exact, her womanhood precisely stark and closed. Today I wrestle laundry from dark maws of machines, nothing hinting of sun or pecan. And our daughter waits out her life, fragile, fragrant, both fists at the ready.

Felt like having a new baby. Impossible, impossible. Still felt like it.

2012-03-23T06:55:14-04:00

Freshen Heather Ross Miller The baby warms me into an oven, kiln, a busy hive of muscle ruby red. My belly raises an izba, pitched tight, yurt, hogan, daub and wattle, snug igloo, blocks of solid blood. She moves, assembling herself, little S, little O, back into the S, save our souls, baby girl before they pull us apart into separate citizens. I will kiss you then, before everyone, and God, refreshed by your clean strong gaze, the amazing lock of your lips on my milk.

My book slowly fills. I hope for a 2013 publication.

2012-03-08T06:37:02-05:00

Fisher Park Circle Heather Ross Miller Before the funeral, I go to my aunt’s house, a fine Victorian place, marble and mahogany, soft footsteps, susurration, my Taylor cousins’ shy smiles. Lowell is there. We do not like each other, but know better than to strike. He says Jarrell had a chemical thing, then hurries to tell about his daughter Harriet. She wrote in her notebook, he says, My mama is the type who holler. This delights my uncle who says that’s what he’s going to call her, next time he sees Lizzie, the type who holler. I think I am the type who holler. I’d like to holler across Fisher Park Circle, Jarrell is dead. Long live Jarrell. But we go out now in a dark line, my uncle and Lowell, bearing the pall.

Can't shut up, poems overflow me.

2012-02-22T10:44:14-05:00

Spare Room Heather Ross Miller Stacks of shoe boxes, the shoes don’t match the boxes, nor each other. A sin to keep something you don’t wear, my mother’s clear voice reminds me. She was a little woman, and so freshly blonde, she could have been Nordic. But she was always cold, huddling toward a cookstove or a fireplace, no matter the season. Shoes, I keep shoes, my shoes, my children’s, and now my grandchildren’s. Filling this spare room with their skips and hops, my slowing shuffles as directly toward death as my mother’s toward some spare left over warmth. We sought to save things, I think, warming ourselves, shoeing ourselves, hoping for a good fit. O sinner, o, believer, spare this, spare this.

And another late Valentine, can't help myself here.

2012-02-16T06:49:40-05:00

Wounds Heather Ross Miller My boy fell and jabbed the plastic arrow into the roof of his mouth. Blood blood everywhere blood his lips his teeth like little Chiclets blood blood. Why did I let him play with it? Dull and pliable plastic? The doctor said it’s okay, wounds in the mouth heal quickly, leave it be, stitches would be worse, leave it be. So we let it be, and he healed, and we threw the arrow away, and got him a slingshot. But I never quite forgot: wounds in the mouth heal quickly. Blood and bone, the wet and the warm, little teeth like little Chiclets, and I am afraid, afraid, love, the wounds in my mouth still bleed, leaching my heart, until it beats white there there rainwater thin.

Mercury, a Found Poem via email

2012-02-15T12:44:57-05:00

--Neil Covey The old light fixer we are recycling before they go in a Gaylord box the Bulbs has to be remove. These builds has mercury in them: when they are broke the mercury travel in the air . Make people sick and get on there close . Take it home and if they have kids they get sick. I too have to work around then and handle them. If you wont to no more about Mercury look it up in the internet

A late Valentine, but genuine.

2012-02-15T08:47:34-05:00

Science Fiction Heather Ross Miller I’m reading a super sci fi story wherein a girl tells her boyfriend how to read a poem, Just walk through it, she says, opening doors, door here, door there, easy easy. So I walk through the poem, open a red door, and find valentines and snow up to the knees, and marry you, easy easy. Beyond a door marked bitter, I see you sick in bed, dying in the brightest sun, while our children weep. Someone here wrote moon, and I don’t even bother to knock, just go in and fall asleep, my arms holding an old pillow, spilling moonstone moonstone, the world smelling of you still healthy and well enough to wake up. We open again the red door, tasting snow and hot cinnamon hearts, the poem loves us, the fiction joyous, and the science of it astonishing.

My something silly, and a real dream, too.

2012-02-04T10:08:57-05:00

In This Dream Heather Ross Miller In this dream, my grandmother, frail as a feather, falls by the window, so frightened she soils herself. I lift her up. She trembles in my arms. And when I look in her face, she blooms into rose petals, girlish and open, easy to harm, then a baby, a baby she is, this old woman of eighty, my grandmother. Immediately, I run a warm bath there and place her in it, her own old kitchen sink, deep and scarred. Everything washes away, she is pink, without blemish or injury, her head a cap of sweet. I open my eyes, and I am eighty, alone and soiled and so frightened, I turn into a baby, and you are running my bath.

Sick as the proverbial dog with cold & cough, waxing sentimental over my kids.

2012-02-01T08:24:18-05:00

The Tasks of Love Heather Ross Miller Silver bicycle, a bouquet of high-flung balloons, and a glass sailboat, these adorn his room. He makes way for dogs, cats, one worn out pony, a beast he loves and soothes, St. Francis, a boy of pigeons and wings, my son. The day we brought him home, the nurse asked, You taking him out to them woods? We lived in a park then. When I said yes, she said, Okay, you feed him good and love him up, ‘cause he be needin it. What did she know of the tasks of love, the feed and the need of it, the holding in arms long long through the night when ice destroys the light you see by? What did we know, my son and his mother, father, his tender sister waiting? We knew, I think, pigeons and wings, the weary pony, glass and balloons, cats, dogs, and the sparkle of a bicycle.

No Diana adoration here, it just came to me, so I wrote it.

2012-01-29T08:50:04-05:00

The Princess Heather Ross Miller She eats her last, scrambled eggs with asparagus, savory morel and chanterelle, sparkling water, a linen napkin to her lips, the heavy Parisian silver slips under the perfect plate on its perfect charger. In the old days, she might’ve had a taster, someone to tongue the poison, or someone to check the horse and saddle first first. But these are better times, and safer, nobody poisons a princess, nobody sabotages the harness. So she goes through a side door, to the car, to the richly upholstered corner. Ritz Carlton cameras catch the back of her head, fresh and blonde, her black tunic, her soft white trousers, the sandals: she is alive, she is well-fed, and when next we see - not her, not a princess - but the shocked blurrings of blurs - she is dead.

An early Valentine, I'm saying

2012-01-23T07:14:35-05:00

And Now I Will Praise Your Philtrum Heather Ross Miller Below your nose, above upper lip, you have a love potion. Somebody said just a groove keeps nursing infants from suffocation. But I think a love potion, and when we kiss, we taste each other’s savory-sweets. You meet somebody disagrees, show them this.

Ah, the lost old dogs of our youth.

2012-01-19T09:02:44-05:00

Mixed Feelings Heather Ross Miller A dog with lots of collie and some shepherd, one of those black-n-tan creations, young, foolish, and terribly loyal - this dog took up with me. Gulliver, I called him. Seemed a right name for a young dog sniffing out new worlds. He’d never be big or powerful, but he’d come up to my knee, easy to pat or kick, not that I’d kick a dog called Gulliver. Shaggy traveler, explorer, I loved him, so warned him about love, how it thins in cold weather. How it’s best never to take love seriously. Then without any warning, the dog gets hit by a loud wild motorcycle. And our world pooling out bloody from him, still fooling paws tail heartbeat raggedy raggedy love and love and love

Icy dark, bitter wind, January night. Then big bright sun all day!

2012-01-13T12:37:16-05:00

Winter, A Snow Leopard Think not that I am come to send peace on earth... but a sword. Heather Ross Miller Winter wraps around, laps my face, and makes me a snow leopard. I am warm. And I am scared. Winter always wakes up hungry. Such a creature rises angry. He can leap the creek, walk on snow, and scent out my secret place. So I dream what he dreams, flexing the black rosettes on his back, nuzzling the black spots on his head, legs, and long long tail. His tail blankets me against the thinly icing air, bitter little crystals on every freezing hair. Ever so often, we open our charmed eyes, blink over the top of this tail, thick enough to make more snow, more us. Then we drop to dream again: we are banners and shields, swords of extreme wrath and love. True children of one true god.

Máscara contra retiro

2012-01-09T10:30:01-05:00

by Sally Jo Sorensen If you are murdered you can bet I'll tell the world you made me love Lucha Libre when you played the rudo and you surrendered a técnicos soul behind the dive your boss loves on the south side of Washington Avenue -- When you lay your brown belt in the alley I took it anyway and wore it home though it clashed with my black linen clothes, contempt and desire pair, incredible even months later now that I lift my mask, walk this bare-faced path away from the ring. But the belt is still mine, and your eyes still brown glistening in streetlights of a Minneapolis winter's fled for fear of you and the stories you held over our heads like black shadows lifted from blue, my El Santo whose face I still don't know.

LAST POEM OF 2011

2012-01-01T10:14:13-05:00

By Robert Rhodes Yesterday a letter from Sarah the painter enclosing a photograph of her elegant in a golden kimono. Last winter, it hung in her studio, an old barn out by Strasburg. "Wear it for me," I said as she stretched and primed a canvas in the empty loft. But she never replied, either way. "So are you happy now?" she wrote on Christmas Day, clothed in a fall of Japanese sunlight, a barefoot woman in a sycamore tree. Her hair was up instead of long. The old brocade shimmered. "Better late than not at all."

Crossings

2012-01-01T00:40:39-05:00

by Sally Jo Sorensen for GRP I wouldn't fear the hooves of a waning western moon bounding off this county road through hood and windshield so much as mercury dropping quicksilver like the moon this third week of September, a sudden shattering summer entering bucks' blood before their velvet's off. Ghosts of their fawns' spots slip like satellites' failing orbits, falling stars I'd never wish upon, taking each corner slowly now, this night. Baffled by this early rut the first frost brings, in that bright blinding in the veins the bucks take all eyes be to their own, embrace two waxing moons that light my own way home.

My family women are tough. And they hang on.

2011-12-28T10:23:39-05:00

All In the Bleak Midwinter for my Aunt Eleanor By Heather Ross Miller Ninety-one, she would not eat, would not speak, pray let me sleep, just awhile, just awhile, then I will remember. She who wanted the lamp held high, she who looking out the new windows at the old house, wanted to go home, it’s getting dark. She not realizing she’d come to a high new house with her parents, her brothers, maybe three, she was, just not old enough to leave one home for another. And now we light the lamp, garland the house, set candles in the windows, driving away chills and shadows, remembering her who wanted it so. Christmas Day she wakes still in a small snowy dress, two bright dimples showing all the happiness, at last come together, and such sunlight when she whispers, We’re here! It’s true! We’re home!

My Aunt Eleanor, still with us, still.

2011-12-18T06:57:45-05:00

Capture Heather Ross Miller What her mother could do: hang the heavy bag ripe with red syrup from the clothesline, catch the sweet drip in a dish pan, then capture it in jars, drip jelly, the purest kind. Her mother who could wring a hen’s neck with one hand, then pick and singe and serve up a succulent bird golden on a china platter. Now she had come to be older than her own mother, buried these years in the leafy ground of Norwood. She had come without jelly, without a china platter, the veins on her hands raised like roots, come to her dying without even a pot of coffee ready for the mourners. So she might sleep awhile, then get it made, coffee, drip jelly, and the hen. She would be ready.

Ira Jean, sounds like a Dolly Parton song.

2011-11-28T07:19:20-05:00

Losing Ira Jean Heather Ross Miller This partheno-daughter, soft hair the dazzle of early winter, small heart-spilling sunbath of milk-fresh snow, eyes clear crystal over deep still water. Ira, watchful one, chosen one, joining the common Jean. Ira Jean. My own immaculately- conceived, Ira Jean. She hollered from her bassinette, wolfed empty the breasts I brought, then shat herself. Herself a pale grooved peach, a downy moon, locked up, way out of reach. Soon cradling Ira Jean in my porch swing, with songs about long rivers of no return, I fell asleep, crickets sawing melodies, pond frogs in the distance jawing deep. When I woke up, something happened: Ira Jean feasted her crystal eyes on the world, her winter blond hair curled both our shoulders, a slight static to the end. What'd you mean growing up? And in just one night? No, she said, been lots more, lots. She got up and walked, a tall strong thing, straight down the street, nobody looked out, nobody came. I sat, with one toe pushed the swing, one song brushed my startled skin, a song about long rivers of no return. Of spontaneous girl children, sugary wintry confections, girls never before seen, my girl I made for me, Ira Jean.

Sometimes we get it right with our kids, sometimes we don't.

2011-11-14T09:32:46-05:00

First Lessons in Love Heather Ross Miller I’m wishing you had a big old brown dog to run with you through the snow, licking your hand, flopping an ear, waving his flag of a brushy tail. You’d loosen up, you’d reach out, you might come to love this more. You might come to see the air around you thrills with voices, people calling, singing, giving you valuables, things they don’t lock. I recall the jewelry box you got, the pink ballerina springing up, the few tawdries you put inside. Christmas then, with whispers of snow over the house, frosting the trees. I have pleased you, my daughter, with a box and a ballerina. With the snow and the trees. I go now to find the brown dog, lead him gently through your years, and when he sees you stand in the door, I will drop the lead and let him run run run to your hand.

Ponder, I'm saying, the lowly apple.

2011-11-12T07:02:07-05:00

Apple Proverb Heather Ross Miller I cut my apple in two red halves down the middle from the stem and there I find two tiny babies curled as if in utero a miracle I didn't cut them so naked and so bound together one either side the apple wound together hand in hand one half only I mean so the other half fell away like a lid what do you do with two babies in your apple what kind of apple succors babies inside her they flex their tiny limbs open their mouths and I bend over to catch their faintly mewing wispy fragile cries I put out a finger they crawl over my hand I feel butterflies old old cliches but lovely truths I take to a green tray of savories growing in the window and there they play in sunshine sucking abrupt and startling health put forth this day this veryvery day