As yet unpublished, but not entirely unpublishable, I hope. -- Jerry Miller
"ProsePoem: 3.1 on the Richter Scale"
The earth, tight as a drum, tries to talk to us in the
language of hula dancers. It is forced to use a sign language for those who aren't deaf but still don't hear.
The earth is a slapstick comedian, and it is working up
to a punch line.
The afternoon is warm and calm, summer floating along on lazy
butterfly wings. There is no wind to blame it on, no thunderclouds to hide something stolen under.
And then the earth moves, only slightly, like a gentle beast
rolling over in its sleep. It shudders, as if it has had a bad dream and can't go back to sleep. The earth is gently shaking us by
the shoulders, trying to get us to listen.
It comes into the room unnoticed, a child on tiptoes, armed with
a rocking horse. The green leaves of house plants shiver, as its cold presence speaks out in the room.
The shiver moves through the veins of the leaves, down the stems,
through the roots, into the vases, and down every step of the plant stand that, with translucent plastic, imitates a ladder. It is quivering
in its boots, like a child in sudden darkness, and it can't help itself.
The shade of a table lamp rattles around its bulb, the grass skirt of a
hula girl. The earth is trying to get our attention.
The room has come unglued, every object tinged with unsteadiness. The
room has the shakes. It needs a drink. Bad. A photograph in a frame jiggles, trying to become a home movie.
The whispers of constant motion catch our eyes by their corners. We
don't know what to make of it. We keep an eye out for further details.
The room soon sobers up, the edges of things in it regaining their
sharp definitions. The child tiptoes out, taking its rocking horse with it. It is calm again, breathing in the slumber of summer. The
earth has only had a bowel movement and gone back to bed.
The survivors poke out of their front doors like groundhogs out of winter.
There is nothing to see except their shadows, so they go back underground. The earth isn't very good at this sort of thing.
"I felt it, but I didn't know what had happened until I heard it on the news."
"I was in my car, so I didn't know anything had happened."
"I was, too. I never noticed anything."
"I was out of town . . . "
The earth has made its bed somewhere under Germantown, Kentucky, and has to
sleep in it. No one but the seismologists have intercepted its message. The prophets will come out of the ground and predict that Indiana is
going to break off and slide into the Ohio River. California will laugh up its tie-dyed sleeve.
The earth has made its small gesture, a hand movement in an eternal hula
dance. It has tried to say that it is still here, beneath the nightmares. A few house plants have been alerted, have taken it all in. The
rest of the world keeps its eyes on the speedometer.
The earth talks mainly to the plants, because it knows they will listen.
Copyright 1998 by Jerry Miller ©
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"ProsePoem: December 25"
Sometimes, standing beside the bed in what Dylan Thomas called the close and
holy darkness, shedding the shirt that has been my snake-skin for the day, something stirs in the night.
It stirs inside the shirt, a small animal that has hidden there all day. I
The shirt, a storage cell for the day's nervous energy, is alive with sudden
small lights. The flicker of fireworks interrupts the close darkness.
Christmas, I think, it is like that, a shower of static electricity in the
glacier of night. The dark does strange, holy things when it chooses.
But it is a metaphor that will not shed, a shirt that will not rustle free.
The body is life and invisibly electric. The sparks light the tree, a gift from the dark.
Christmas crackles in the blackness of time. In the tiny moment of a spark, a
star steadily lights a child's Christmas anywhere.
The child, many nights an adult, glows out of the ashes of gifts and warmth long
since donated to charity. The train, much wished for and electric, runs its going-nowhere track again.
The towns of apple trees, manger-like limbs of apple and pear trees in the
grandfather yard, populate overnight. A tiny tree as old as the child himself sprouts gumdrops again, instead of colored bulbs. Favorite uncles
try out favorite jokes, and they are funny again.
The child's head is patted again. The snowballs fall like fish into the snow
ocean. There is writing in the snow.
And the spark dies out, hiding in a shirt pocket. Other miniature stars fall
out of the dark.
It is all magic.
A graveyard of a past December swallows up the father of the fenced yards. But,
like an electric shirt in the dark, it gives up something, too. A hole in the fences.
The adult-edged child touches the cold marble and takes the gift. It is wrapped
in tears and flowers that turn black the instant they hit the fast-frozen air.
It is a difference between presents and gifts. Presents are the things in the
closet beside the bed that will be useless fossils before Christmas stirs again.
Gifts are the sparks that flash forever in the night. You receive them and
never give them up to trash bins and rummage sales.
They are rolling up white boulders in finger-freezing cold with family. Touches
of children in the early dawn that cannot wait. Acts of love mingling in the dark like holy secrets.
I have received an early gift. It is hidden, like a wanted toy, in the forest
where death invites us in.
I think I am on the road to the hospital to say goodbye to the grandfather who
was master of the apple and pear trees of other Christmases. I am alone because you don't say goodbye in a crowd.
A stroke, like a spark that kills a forest, has chopped him down. He is the
promise of a sturdy, honorable longevity that has finally broken. I don't want to see it.
The sun invades the car like cigar smoke. I am already uncomfortable. Shedding
my coat performs no visible magic.
I will stop along the way to touch a cold tombstone again, but there is nothing
else to do but drive on. There is no gift this time in the graveyard.
Grandfather is fine.
He says he will probably have to quit driving his car. He is ninety-five now.
It makes me smile even though he doesn't mean it to be funny.
I don't say goodbye. I only drive away toward the eve of Christmas. Eight
jetstreams squiggle above the pink horizon like white tadpoles. The earth still gives back life.
The gifts are the things you don't have to save the receipts for or exchange
tomorrow. Like the empty skins of men thrown into the dark, they show themselves at night, on the eve of sleep.
Christmas comes when it damn well chooses.
The child or part of a child undresses and covers himself with bedclothes. The
dark begins to close in on him.
He waits in the holy silence for something to stir among the blankets. He is
not afraid. It is still magic.
Copyright 1998 by Jerry Miller ©
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