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James Miller

A Retreat

Yesterday

as we drove

into the southern

mountains

           

            the right horizon

            gloomed, silent.

            Agave and yucca

 

waited for rain.

 

                        Spout of dust:

           

            the spinning seemed to join

            brush in the middle distance

            to advancing, stony clouds.

            Impossible to catch

            the moment

                       this guest

 

loosened

and lifted its thumb

from our earth,

 

            thought to draw

            itself in.

Grass and Stone

I unloaded the first boxes, lifted them into the new house.

 

Near sunset the woman next door

            stopped to ask three safe questions, waited for three safe answers.

 

One Friday, I forgot to lower the garage door before going to bed. Next morning,

             the woman said, “I saw that you didn’t close up last night. Could be dangerous—

                         asking for trouble.”

 

Later that summer, I bought a new camera and spent several weeks

            learning its secrets. After lunch, I left the house with the camera hanging

                         in its harness, bouncing on my chest. I let the camera capture whatever

                                     it could—unmoored, no hands.

 

I made sandwiches and sat to watch the playback. Flash of green

           and brick, truck wheel, azalea branch, leaf-strewn roof. The sounds

                      were more interesting: hum and roar of cars, lawnmowers,

                                    stiff wind. Spanish from driveway radios, saws droning

                                                in workbench garages.

 

In those days, I had trouble sleeping. Mostly I stayed up to re-watch

            Cronenberg horror from the 80s, or dozed through the neighborhood footage

                       on my laptop. Sometimes I isolated the audio and listened

                                     to the texture of my own footsteps crossing

                                                 from grass to stone,

                                                              stone to grass.

James Miller won the Connecticut Poetry Award in 2020. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review, Lunch Ticket, The Atlanta Review, 2River, A Minor, Typehouse, Eclectica, Rabid Oak, pioneertown, Juked, North Dakota Quarterly, Yemassee, Phoebe, Mantis, Scoundrel Time, Permafrost, SOFTBLOW and elsewhere.

James Miller
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