Matthew Moser Miller:
Kingdomtide
I once kicked down a tree for love. I say love,
meaning firewood—the pile by the bonfire
exhausted, my lover and her friends
staring at its lack. The larch so run through
with rot you could tell it by touch.
Easy, then, to stomp the trunk
continually in half. It is a matter of angles.
It is what boots are for. It is me, scarecrow
in a too-warm coat. A disorder of birds
claiming the pines two houses down.
Someone knowing that all it will take
is a clap in the darkness to sling them out.
I End All Our Conversations with “I’ll Let You Go;” or, Life Before and After the Disruption
Always, this luxury of want. From outside my windows,
those trainswhistle crows.
And lying in the orchard floor, the sky
gunmental and plum—
I remember when a cloud would give you its word.
None of this built for reason, and still we try.
South of here, a thousand hawks comb insects
from the cut broom corn. A woman killed a black lamb
and buried it under her door step. A boy was found
clutching to a bag of welks on the sea bottom.
Ever since then, it was dumb dogs that followed.
There were local services kept by several men.
A strange loneliness in knowing I’m a call
from someone all bare and heat in my bed.
And choosing, sometimes, not to make it.
Before you left, I wore a sinnet of flax at my wrist
and explained myself to no one.
The young children climbed on a big stone
southeast of the fishing station
and allowed the sea to surround them.
Stonehaven
A spear thistle pawed at
by a carpenter bee. The sudden flare of poppies
looking for all the world like the wind
had broken its nose on the cliff.
Crossing the stream I’d thrown our umbrella into,
years ago. You smiling, I hate to think, and far from here.
And that shell of a fortress crouching
with its back to the sea. It was sheerness
and guard. It was retreat-of-last-resort and I should
sympathize but am sick
of the gout of people wending their way
to its mouth, to pay and stare at the hollow
where years ago men were casually
burned in a block-doored church.
I know the place. I’ve paid and seen it. Twice.
So this time, instead, the poppies. The hogweed
and sun of us, old blister and scar. This time
me pretending to have seen ruin enough.
MATTHEW MOSER MILLER is a born-and-raised Ohioan. He studied creative writing at Denison
University and the University of Aberdeen, where he received Aberdeen’s Calder
Prize for Poetry. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where he was a
Hopwood Award winner and a Zell Postgraduate Fellow, and some of his recent work has
appeared in Gettysburg Review, Narrative, The Offing, and
Prairie Schooner. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he now
lectures at the University of Michigan.More from this
issue >