As yet unpublished, but not entirely unpublishable, I hope. -- Jerry Miller
"ProsePoem: Goodbye, Charlie"
Charlie, your mother is on the phone, and she won't stop crying.
I didn't mean to upset her; I was only trying to revive you from the days we were friends at broadcasting school out East.
I didn't know you had died until I talked to your cousin in West Chester. He told
me to call your brother, but he has an unlisted number. Just like you, Charlie.
So I called your mother and made her cry without meaning to. I told her we used to be
good buddies, you and I, but it didn't help much. She is telling me you never went into broadcasting, never married, just ran an inn
until your poor health checked you out early.
We had been friends in a city where friends were already becoming hard to come by
back in 1958. You were as solid as the yellow line down the middle of a crowded, threatening street in a place, broadcasting school,
where overconfidence and underconfidence were the yellow cabs that took you there. You had only a toy wagon of each, which kept you
in better balance than the prima donnas and neurotics who made up most of our class picture. And you gave me, vicariously, a sense of
balance, too, weighted too heavily as I always was to the sidecar of toe-scuffing introversion.
I do remember, of course, the time you sat in the classroom flipping your open
penknife into the wooden seat of one of the empty chairs. It was your manner of threatening me because you thought I had made time
with your girlfriend, Dotty, the Body, the dispassionate kisser, while you went home for the weekend. You just kept flipping the knife,
sticking it into the chair seat, imagining, I suppose, it was my disloyal heart. And it was, in a way.
We got over it or past it, after I assured you that we only went to the movies together.
I left out the part about the dispassionate kisses for half the night afterward. I leave it out now, too, when I talk to your mother, Charlie.
But that was the thing with Dotty. She did that with all the boys. She had done it with
me before, when you weren't away, and again when you were. At the Christmas party, I remember; I still have the photograph, in fact. It was
nothing if not dispassionate, whether you were away or not (and I won't ask your mother if you were home for Christmas, 1958, she would
only cry more). She did it and told all the boys, including you, Charlie, that it didn't mean anything because she was certainly going to
marry Tony, the skinny, city-streets guy from her own neighborhood, when he finished school. Everyone believed it and lived with it except
you, Charlie.
But that was the centerline of the road for you and for the rest of us overconfident or
underconfident would-be Walter Cronkites. You didn't swerve off to either side, only pulled over to pick up an occasional lost hitchhiker
like Dotty. Everyone knew, except you, Charlie, that she was going to leave you at the side of the highway, freezing and hurt, but the first
act of kindness had always been yours and none of us could take that away from you. Besides, she had great wonderful breasts, the size of
Michigan cantaloupes, that she openly teased all the boys with, except maybe you, Charlie.
I would have liked to have told you all this, but your phone has been disconnected forever.
I can only hope that in the after-life, as we all wait in line for our next assignments, in that karmic roadside inn with no phones or
complimentary stationery, there will at least be some kind of spiritual bulletin board to post messages on.
Charlie, your mother is still on the phone, and she never will stop crying. And I am sorry
I called so late.
Copyright 1998 by Jerry Miller ©
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"ProsePoem: Places I've Never Been Again"
The wind blows through the open window like time through the skipping legs
of a child. The flimsy curtains fly back, veined butterfly wings, and hang there, billowed and not talking back, whispers
of spring flying in my face.
The window is half up, half down; the blind, a black border around it like
the ones they run around pictures of dead people, flaps back and forth against the woodwork, drummer of the wind.
The road beyond the window doesn't go anywhere, except perhaps to the white
lake beside the black woods. It isn't even a road, only a path, two ruts that hold hands as they walk away through the brown
grass.
The off-white sky rests on the tops of the trees like a scoop of ice cream.
The trees are pines, I think, branches intruding in the ice cream like the arms of candy dishes.
It is May, probably, and I am supposed to imagine someone on the path. Myself,
or a pair of lovers giving me the backs of their hands. Or death walking this way, or life trying to get its bearings.
It plays its little game with me, hiding in the distance before it gets
where it is going. I can make it go wherever I like. And I do. I take it to the lake. It is whatever lake I want it to be.
I make it the lake I remember where I could sit on the small boat dock and splash my bare feet through the water like flying fish.
I make it the same lake where I fell off the dock into the lake with my clothes on,
where I rode in a speedboat, where I started when I heard bears knock over the trash cans at night. That was a long time ago.
I can walk along the lake until it comes to the woods. I can veer away and stand
under the black trees, changing day into night whenever I want to. I remember the trees. They are the same ones I hunted among for
mushrooms that made their beds under wet leaves, the ones where I watched insects live forever. That was a long time ago, too.
And I can make the path come back to the house, to the window with the flying curtains.
And the path can make me come back to the house, whether I want to or not.
There is a crack in the plaster beside the half-open, half-closed window. The rest of
the room is behind me in the shadows. I can only look out the window and imagine the breeze that flings the curtains in my face
like sudden spider webs.
I can imagine it all, the windows and the curtains and the lake and the woods and
the ice-cream sky. It is only a painting, sitting on Celeste's desk, leaning back against the wall like a streetwalker. Its curtains
do not billow; its blinds do not flap-tap against the woodwork. Its ice cream has no flavors at all.
I look into the painting and see things that are not there. I like that, even though
it is barely enough. I cannot picture myself in it anywhere and, like the two-fold path to a lake that isn't there, I cannot see where
it wants me to go.
Copyright 1998 by Jerry Miller ©
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