The Tightrope Walker
walking across America
on telephone wires will be an important
symbol. Each night, on the living-room TV,
a quick shot of him stepping over
Scranton, Youngstown, Toledo, Joliet
(and a bit of the accompanying commentary).
Near the end, Justine will look out
the window and there he'll be—approaching
her roof—his balancing pole held out
before him like a broken mast. She'll phone
Clarence then—her words streaming
beneath the walker's feet. She'll say
something like: Who'll know if he falls
in Nebraska, or Wyoming—after the news
forgets him? Clarence's reply: Perhaps two lovers
—like us—talking across the country, will hear
a trembling in their voices,
as the quivering wire upsets the birds—
2 comments:
That's pretty cool. Maybe my point of reference is too limited, it does bring to mind Russell Edson a bit, though this is sweeter than Edson typically gets.
I'm all about titles and how they can introduce additional layers into a poem. The title here works in effect as the first line to set up the "literal" scene, so it does work, but it seems like it's also missing an opportunity to take the whole poem further, deeper, farther, faster.
It's from his new book, BOOK OF PROPS--a poem from a section about those characters--with the subtitle "Notes on a Film in Verse." The PW review: Transformations—from the everyday to the wondrous and/ or haunting—are everywhere in Miller’s elegant second book. The poems are at once dreamlike and fervent in their will to cleave to the material world. “Sleep gives the body back its mouth,” writes Miller in one poem. Elsewhere, the shouts of a beaten man become “flashbulbs/ striking the river,” and a lightning storm becomes a meditation on loss and clarity. In the title poem, everyday objects—a hammer, glasses, a cup, a matchbook—take on mythic significance, as if they had souls of their own, and a lover’s kiss becomes “another object pressed/ between them.” Miller (Only the Senses Sleep) mixes what is with what we perceive and what could be without explanation or commentary. A series of poems labeled “notes for a film in verse” continue Miller’s exploration of the intersection of observation and artifice, this time through whimsical characters—a tightrope walker hiking telephone wires across the country, a pair of distant, angels talking to scarecrows, a girl fascinated by cement trucks, a drawbridge operator in a bar. Miller remains a poet to watch, and one who strives to ”separate/ the seeing from what’s seen.”
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