You limp along coated in ash
glowing like radiation or starlight.
I won’t know which until you go.
Besides, they are the same.
So long I chased the resolution—
how to make concrete feel remorse, swifts
change course, bulbs will themselves
not to bloom. You’ll leave
one more unfinished row.
III
Disenthrall
you can feel the presence
of a possible otherwhere.
—Lucille Clifton
The same road awaited. Someday came
to set out walking.
A whirling turnkey toy in the night circus,
one Polaroid replacing the hours
no man or child would save you.
Your weather
came to waste you. How I yearned
to claim a new ecosystem,
that dry stand of beetle kill pine.
We do not resolve. The ceiling caves in other
ways, sighing through its transmutation.
To rise, I wandered underland. We embarked
through the matoa, fog-thick, slick,
and tedious except in the sharpest places.
Fretted, passed ourselves hand to hand.
A valley with a roof, a crypt blueshifted,
a novel muddle we brighten to ferry aloft.
When would each shattered knuckle
reform and tuck away its denser
secret? When at last you became
a gutter luring water from the door.
When you rose, a skin boat on the ice floe.
The pinnacle a foothill, the trumpets heralding
fermata, muffled crow.
I inherited not a house, but the memory
of a house. The stranger camouflaged,
stretched shadow before breaching the cellar,
white paint grit-stained.
We cannot ever be alone. Broad day,
rain mixed with snow. No harm,
no me for two generations, no place
I could touch except in sleep to say
at last but I didn’t live here. So my dragon
was a paper lantern, never even wild.
When the moth-eaten phantoms tire,
may we choke ourselves awake.
Any no one could play this hollow interloper
who tells you to transform—your frame outfitting
itself, inverting triangular. You in your own
scapulae, over-honed, over-knowing,
your byline too modernist and should change.
Hear that: even your name too much your name.
Then where could I pass through,
a cemetery, the great hoard,
every piece of plastic you touched
I held as a child, another
spent wire. What resistance might
we amass in that last field, museum
boned in fabric wrapped your recollection,
from which a hawthorn grew.
Your vessel through the Inside Passage
did not prepare you for the one from Arctic
Wales that blew away. A storm, an ice season,
the aching in your makeshift hut—you should have
followed the custom, stayed warm in the earth.
Nine dozen letters by oil lamp to walk across
the channel, court a companion to the rock.
Who will live to speak of you, to proclaim
you have frozen as you will unfurl.
Rushing circulation shakes you,
you had a father and will never
have him again. Forgetting
the northern constellations,
equations you faltered through
but did not comprehend.
Plain vanilla ice cream, worn-in flannel,
white-crowned sparrow.
What did I do instead of drawing
you into the world? Sang an opera,
six, stayed up past an early bedtime. Let
a story tell me, thinned the pear tree’s
inside, witnessed the peach scar over
and set April’s buds in January.
Cleaned up my brown leaves and thought,
if the sun returns, it will strike right here.
All this time our mass was a behavior,
not intrinsic. How solid then
our uncertain potential, the probability
we’ll orbit each other until decay.
An array emitted from my first note,
my hand quaking everywhere,
the point unknowable.
Even where the real people hadn’t walked,
a bird had flown. Eggs tucked in the craggy
plateau and otherwise a sprout of moss,
fissures spanning the compass
to Russia, past the ship receding,
the next rounded eon, invaders discovering
nothing but themselves.
IV
Lay Down Your Rigid Creation
Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. . . . There are other ways of telling.
—Rebecca Solnit
In the tented twilight, triangle of canopy
through the vinyl port, I felt
your blood in my blood, saw you
on your back in the salvaged wood
cabin that first winter in the Bering Strait.
The petrified ivory you scavenged
tucked in your leather briefcase,
seal-shaped inkwell and beaded mukluks,
spoils of a sluggish war.
How many times did you almost see me,
a particle sputtering from the void.
I measure our revolution in steps on the surface,
in shovelsful, in seasons until flowering
and fruit. I found you staring out,
half-cropped café lights in the solstice
night and all your hair—we both know
you haven’t looked that way in epochs.
Which of us will welcome leaving life
as from the once-dreamt party.
When the saying ceases, this
dented canoe. Preparing for the day
we could wax static, but we
extinguish. Paddle,
promise. The best part about winter
is winter, pause in the dimming chute.
Whatever you do, the wheels will break
away. Tomorrow they rusted out yesterday—
you slept with your not-love waiting
for the eleventh floor, wind river running green.
What is a family, an evening your routes divide,
cigarette smoke and shouts wafting
up from the bars below.
Enough time and you cannot
argue. Acid-strip hydrangeas
blue-purple straggling
our consolation. A stolen
white-blossomed bicycle. Your hands
full of marbles, of button
thread, the heaviest bag of flour
crawling with weevils. How will you
raise the food to your mouth?
After hate lies twine into granite, brine
into mineral creatures made of lace.
On the other side of ice,
invention, your ulu, reindeer fur,
and walrus stomach traded for a crisp
apron. I went on a growing-up adventure, too,
into the hearts of children, where I fear
I’m lodged, all shrapnel and good intention.
Great-grandfather I never knew, your son-in-law
born on Skokomish land I still cross,
city to the razored oyster beds. Everywhere
we’ve gone to plant our history, the lichen
follows. Crab pot hauling up a giant octopus.
Quonset hut surfing the permafrost
where my father’s little hands could not will
a single watermelon to grow. No chance you’d guess
how it would subside, how your sudden exit
would shackle us to rebirth.
The weak graft split overnight,
bangles of unripe apples in the mulch.
There was no resurrection. Nothing to do
but throw away the old tree and move on.
We mark and fuss over the particulars,
About forty miles from Nome we encountered
the ice. The woman who loved God could question.
He brought her to the island not, in fact,
beatified. Pieces from fifty to one hundred
feet long above water. Might drink her away,
his sons, his daughter’s son. The names untangle
something in the cells as they tug, St. Michael,
Point Hope.
What recovered from the wayward slicing
dared not form a petal. Half sister, half traitor,
half inhabitant of a borrowed body. The fact is
she returned. Meanwhile, the moon passed
between us. I pictured a glowing circle in the black,
not splashed plasma on a purple midday sky.
Not my trapped sepals metamorphosed
in the sediment, fleeing preservation.
One day, history runs out.
The schematic alone
more than everything you ever toted,
the thought of your acacia grazing
unfamiliar atmosphere. What dark energy you bring
to expand the universe is not yours to inventory.
No more testimony.
What, then, was the nature of light?
The new system hung incommensurate
though it had the same name, as in marriage
or mother. A ripple of photons
banded at the margin, where we jumped,
one state to another.
I wanted for you the invisible door,
the one you couldn’t search for,
the end of your breath’s long hallway.
Author’s Note
The epigraphs come from Anne Sexton’s “Baby Picture,” Lucie Brock-Broido’s “Bodhisattva,” Lucille Clifton’s “11/10 again,” and Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby.
The italicized text in the poem beginning “About forty miles from Nome” comes from a 1908 letter written by my paternal great-grandmother Lois Thompson, on her way by ship from Seattle to Iŋaliq (Little Diomede Island) in the Bering Strait. She accompanied her new husband, my great-grandfather Roy Thompson, a committed socialist who was the first white schoolteacher to make it through the winter on the island and was returning for a second year. Eileen Norbert’s beautiful and meticulously researched Menadelook (Sealaska Heritage Institute in association with University of Washington Press, 2016) includes descriptions of community life among the Inaliit at that time. Though my great-grandfather went with the express intention to be of service to humankind, the government and missionary school systems left a painful, multigenerational legacy for many Alaska Natives. Launch points for further reading include William L. Iġġiaġruk Hensley’s Fifty Miles from Tomorrow (Picador, 2010) and Ernestine Hayes’s Blonde Indian (University of Arizona Press, 2006).
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the journals in which excerpts from this book first appeared: 8 Poems, Berfrois, can we have our ball back?, Empty Mirror, and Parentheses.
Multiple intersecting indie lit scenes have been my community and inspiration for the last fifteen-plus years, and I’m grateful to all the editors and compatriots who’ve taken chances on my work and supported me during that time. In particular, thank you to Christian Peet of Tarpaulin Sky and the team at Sidebrow.
A lineage of teachers and mentors extending back to childhood encouraged me to live within language, including Whitney Tjerandsen, Vicki O’Keefe, Joyce Thompson, Stephen Thomas, Les Lessinger, Helene Foley, Saskia Hamilton, Quandra Prettyman, my instructors at Centrum, and my professors at Mills College, particularly my advisors, Stephen Ratcliffe and Elmaz Abinader.
I would not have made it this far without my long-standing writing group—Carly Anne West, Nina LaCour, and Laura Joyce Davis—or my nonblood family since before conscious memory, Kristen. Much appreciation to Jessica M. and Linda Brice for guiding me and bearing witness as I’ve woken from old trances.
Eternal gratitude to the National Poetry Series for supporting contemporary poets, judge Carol Muske-Dukes for choosing this collection, and editors Paul Slovak and Allie Merola for believing in it and giving it the gift of careful attention. This book represents the fourth manuscript and eighth time I’ve submitted to the contest, as well as my third manuscript to be a finalist—and its publication marks the culmination of one of my oldest dreams.
My partner in life, art, and crime, Gregory, has picked me up off the existential pavement too many times to count, dusted me off, and reminded me the process is all we have. Even on the days when I don’t love the creative journey, I love him.
Last but certainly not least, love and thanks to my parents, Sylvia and Marvin, who supported my commitment to writing from the earliest days. My late father’s relentless genealogical research before the advent of DNA methods lives on through many families’ records around the world and shaped my perspective on history and ancestry. My mother instilled in me an artist’s sensibility and read me poetry before I was born—I think some part of her has always known where I was headed.
Photo by Teresa K. Miller
Teresa K. Miller is the author of sped and Forever No Lo as well as coeditor of Food First: Selected Writings from 40 Years of Movement Building. Her poems and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, AlterNet, Entropy, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Originally from Seattle, she graduated from Barnard College and the Mills College MFA program and now tends a mini orchard near Portland, Oregon. Her middle initial is for her great-great-aunt Kate Thompson, a childless adventurer who knew all the birds.
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