Wayne Miller is the author of four poetry collections, including Post- (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2016), which won the Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award. He lives in Denver with his wife and two children and teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, where he edits the literary journal Copper Nickel.

Poems

The Debt

He entered through the doorway of his debt.
Workmen followed, bringing box after box

until everything he’d gathered in his life
inhabited his debt. He opened the sliding door to the yard—

a breeze blew through the spaces of his debt,
blew the bills from the table onto the floor.

The grove of birches and, farther,
the beach of driftwood and broken shells

were framed by the enormous window—
that lens-like architectural focus of his debt.

He drove into town on the coiled springs
of his debt; when he bought fish at the market

he proffered his Mastercard. The dark woods
stretching inland were pocked by lightfilled cubes

of debt. The very words he used to describe
his surroundings were glittering facets

of debt. Each visit, we smoked on the deck
and, over drinks, he reminded me

with love and genuine pride: one day
all this debt would be mine.

“The Debt” from Post-. Copyright © 2016 . Used with permission from Milkweed Editions.

Post-Elegy

After the plane went down
the cars sat for weeks in long-term parking.
Then, one by one, they began to disappear
from among the cars of the living.

———

When we went to retrieve his
you drove the rows of the lot
while I pushed the panic button on the fob.

———

Inside, a takeout coffee cup
sat in its cradle,
a skim of decay
floating beneath the lid.
I’d ridden in his car
many times but never driven it.

———

When I turned the key
the radio
opened unexpectedly,
like an eye.

———

I was conscious of the ground
passing just beneath the floor—
and the trapped air in the tires
lifting my weight. I realized

I was steering homeward
the down payment
of some house we might live in
for the rest of our lives.

Originally published in Post- (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2016).

Inside the Book

For my daughter: these images,
these trenches of script. She keeps
reaching to pull them
from the page, as if the book
were an opened cabinet;

every time, the page
blocks her hand. They’re right
there—those pictures
vivid as stained glass,
those tiny, inscrutable knots.

They hang in that space
where a world was built
in fits and erasures—she wants
to lift that world
into her own.

Meanwhile, this world
floods her thoughts,
her voice; it fills
the windows, the streets
she moves through;

it reaches into her
as the air reaches into her lungs.
Then, before we know it,
here she is with us
inside the book.

Originally published in Post- (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2016).

The People’s History

The People moved up the street in a long column—
like a machine boring a tunnel. They sang
the People’s songs, they chanted the People’s slogans:
We are the People, not the engines of the city;
we, the People, will not be denied.
                                                     Then the People
descended upon the People, swinging hardwood batons
heavy with the weight of the People’s intent.

And the People surged, then, into the rows before them,
pushing the People against the blurred arcs
of truncheons, the People throwing rocks
into the plastic shields and visors,
                                                     behind which
the People blinked when the rocks hit, then pushed back
so the mass of People before them compressed.

In the windows above the street, the People looked down
and thought, Thank god we’re not the People
trapped, now, in the confines of those bodies.

And soon the People on rooftops loaded their rifles
with wax bullets—which looked like earplugs —

which the People had produced in factories
full of People flanking machines designed by the People.

When the bullets buried themselves in the People
the People cried, Those shooters are not the People,
some piece of them has been removed—
like a fuse—the true People are a surface
that floats on the sea of our fathers—
how they buoy us! the People shouted.

But the People had grown tired of the afternoon
and released dogs into the crowd, dogs
that could not tell the People from the People;
and the People fled in all directions, back into the city,
singing with pain.
                             —And now, children,
when we meet the People in the market
how will we know them? Their clubs and their bruises,
their language of power.
                                What about concepts?
They fill them with bodies.
                                    And weapons?
They spend hours piecing them together.

What else? They open their mouths.

And what else? Nothing—they open their mouths.
Is that wrong?
                       —Excuse me,
but what gives us the right to define them?

That’s not what I’m saying.
                                           Excuse me,
but aren’t we, too, the People? Yes, but wiser.

But sir, how can the surface be different from the sea?

Originally published in Post- (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2016).

Ballad (American, 21^st Century)

That spring, the shooter was everywhere—
     shot from our minds into the hedgerows,
the pickup beds and second-floor windows,
     the hillocks and tentacled live oaks. And sometimes

he was tracking us with the dilated
     pupil at the tip of his rifle. His bullets spun
into the theater’s stop-sign faces, the tessellated
     car lots beyond the exits; they tore holes

in our restaurants and vinyl siding, those fiberglass
     teacups we clamored into at the county fair.
Though you don’t remember it, Little Bear,
     a bullet crossed right in front of your car seat—

then window glass covered you like bits
     of clouded ice, and the rain came pouring in
as I raced for shelter at the Wendy’s off Exit 10.
     Every night we kept our curtains drawn,

and while your mother slept I sat alone
     in the bathroom dark watching the news surface
into the ice-cut window of my cell phone.
     They said the shooter was in Saint Louis

shooting up a middle school gym, then
     he’d gone to the beach, where he killed a girl
pouring sand from a cup into a sandwich tin.
     (Nevertheless, I pictured his face as a cloud

of insects hovering in the blackest corner
     of the empty lot across the street.) At work
they walked us through scenarios—what to throw
      if he came through my classroom door,

how to arm the students (desks!)
     for counterattack. And when he came—
and when those next four children were erased—
     they trapped him in a high-speed chase

toward the touchless carwash, where the cops
     encircled him and, rather than relent,
he put his rifle barrel to his mouth like the mouth
     of a test tube from some childhood experiment.

Originally published in Post- (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2016).

Image: Psychotherapy

The ship is so close to shore
it seems ridiculous it can’t be righted.
Every day it slips a little more.

The rooftop pool has poured its water
into the sea. The stacks’ mouths
dip below the tide—water

inside an engine already underwater.
It feels like I should be able
to reach out and shift the rudder

on its massive hinge, lift the ship
back into its buoyancy. Even here—
on this shelf past the lip

of town—it’s impossible
to have any real sense of its scale.

Originally published in Post- (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed, 2016).

The Humanist

When he rose before the jury of his peers
he knew he had arrived at the endgame
of his belief, mirror against mirror,

and when they read to him his crimes—
his betrayal of the time’s
consensus—he saw he would be folded into the body

of the human story. He would be
judged and found guilty
of elevating men to this very position of judgment.

The loneliest person on earth
is a humanist condemned. When the pyre
was lit, it bloated the square

with light—the light his body fed.
(Later the guards cleaned up in darkness.
We have no record of what they said.)

“The Humanist” appeared on the website 32 Poems.

After the Miscarriage

We went out to sit in the car
—snow coming down—
just to get out of the house.

I lowered the window sometimes
to stop the snow
from sealing us in.

———

The lights were still on
in those rooms where our daughter,
barely three, kept moving,
shifting her things.

———

How many days—
weeks—did we leave her
in that lit-up silence?

———

Back inside,
we let our footprints
melt on the floor.

She ran and hugged us
each entirely, as though

we’d come home after curfew
to this devoted,
oblivious parent.

“After the Miscarriage” appeared in Field. Copyright © 2017 .

Ohio, My Friends Are Dying

I see their final days
in empty rooms

in that city
I left. See

their days as empty rooms
I left—empty

because I left.
Though, surely

their lives were filled
with things

I can’t see, filled,
as mine was elsewhere,

with time
that gathered to become

whatever their lives
meant to them.

Of course
more filled them

than heroin.
Days gathered

into a heavy lens
through which

I see my friends,
blurred, in those

abstract rooms
that suddenly emptied.

“Ohio, My Friends Are Dying” appeared in Waxwing magazine.

Carillon

Phones were ringing

in the pockets of the living
and the dead

the living stepped carefully among.
The whole still room

was lit with sound—like a switchboard—
and those who could answer

said hello. Then
it was just the dead, the living

trapped inside their clothes
ringing and ringing them—

and this was
the best image we had

of what made us a nation.

“Carillon” appeared in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day. Copyright © 2017 .