five poems

by David P. Miller

Twenty-Six Starting Points

Anxious, we’ll look at “afraid,” that word’s aura.

Breathing back and forth, between us, doctors and me.

Creatures inside this mutual movie, will we aid the others.

Dreaming we’re not nowhere, born once and still, yet.

Everything, take us there, return every just word.

Find everyone missing nothing, awake.

Give language, go to grass: yes I would breathe that.

Help the beings, hey humans, you very human.

I begin, again, launched, or: “I” begins again.

Joined and certain, we’ll dissect “frightened.”

Know who the missing and existing are.

Language can make certain of us missing.

Moving from, say, grass to curb to storm, we, they are.

Now two or more are nowhere: well, who? Children?

Out of breathing, out of everything, turned from existing.

Proposition: I examine “horror,” feel around inside “glory.”

Quite missing, all the taken.

Right breathing, we want this, right dreaming.

Some “I” sits uncertain, stands nowhere.

There’s the asking: who was born? Are we done?

Us, creatures: mention our little names on a road to where.

Very, no, completely taken: babies, doctors, farmers.

Words for a world we’d drive out.

X-out boss worlds, make roads rise.

You, with clean breathing: interrogate “terrorized,” “living.”

Zero minutes, zero seconds, in sawdust and wind.

Hank a Rope

I.

I dressed one year as a Cub Scout before

den-duty bored the grownups and they quit.

To make this solo year real, I aimed

at a Bronze Arrow of sure achievement,

quizzed the accomplishments checklist

all stouthearted cubs would conquer.

I first chose “Hank a Rope.” Just my hands,

a piece of rope, with promise of no bafflement

by skin-slicing, bone-smashing hand tools.

So I read the directions, got a rope,

hanked the thing. Showed it to my father

for his Dad’s stamp of approval. He frowned,

denied I’d learned anything, said I had to hank

multiple ropes without reading a how-to.

Well darn, I’d made my hank and had no more

hankering. So away flew my Bronze Arrow.

II.

Reader – say your name is Henry – we will now learn to hank a rope. Read what follows:

Shake out a length of rope in a straight line. Hold one end in one hand. By making loops, coil the rope on the same hand, twisting it carefully so it remains limp. When nearly finished coiling, take one loop, pass it around the whole hank and back through the loops held in your hand.

Repeat, out loud. Get this in your mouth. You’ll never learn to hank a rope with eyes alone.

Shake out a length of rope in a straight line. Hold one end in one hand. By making loops, coil the rope on the same hand, twisting it carefully so it remains limp. When nearly finished coiling, take one loop, pass it around the whole hank and back through the loops held in your hand.

Repeat till memorized. Then set this poem aside overnight.

III.

The next day’s sticky-fingered dawn appears.

Hank, can you recite, word perfect, each stage

of rope-hankerage? Do not cheat by looking back.

If not: return to Part II and repeat.

If so: Huzzah! You and I, by dint of lips,

teeth, tongue, and vocal chords, are

self-certified literary rope-hankers.

IV.

I would ask my father: could he now approve

my achievement, not exactly as imagined

by semi-interested Den Dads and Moms,

but as a substitute better late than none?

But the opportunity has gone. No Dad

myself, I can’t act as my own surrogate.

Is there no other man to mentor me

straight toward my Bronze Arrow?

What I Really Mean is All of This

I write for myself and strangers – Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans

And am I not a writer this morning?

Pants seat on usual chair, pencil

(slightly sharp) at blank page. Third coffee

in Calamityware mug. Extra points:

Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach cello suites in the next room.

Stop. Another “poem” poem?

Throat-clearing salvaged for lyric?

At the lip of an ars poetica precipice

(help!), circling the self-referential drain.

So I’ll stop avoiding my brother’s

sudden aphasia, erupted from nowhere.

Doctors ordered MRI, EEG.

No stroke apparent. That is,

he didn’t suffer a second stroke.

“Maybe there’s a poem in that,”

someone told me when I posted

a picture of a stack of spam

email subject lines, four in one hour

warning me of sciatic nerve pain.

Maybe there’s a poem in my anxiety,

but now it’s a day after the Bach-cello hour,

and my brother’s aphasia is fading.

Thank you, someone. And no one understands.

Here this is after all, an I-went-somewhere-

saw-something kind of poem.

It constantly happens. We go,

even seated in a chair, and see something.

How about a pact? Between the speaker,

that mystery person, and the reader,

actual in the body of you, reading.

(Stein knew these two quite well.)

Shake hands on this: life-writing and writing-

writing share the same four dimensions.

Quotations and the dulling pencil lead,

Yo-Yo Ma sounded from CD pits.

My brother released from hospital

in Philadelphia, returning to Massachusetts,

speech repairing with each conversation.

It’s one big assemblage.

If It’s Not One Thing

It’s another, right between the eyes.

Words faint from shame: “prayers,” “compassion,” “fraud.”

Spew after spew.

One of my old professors asked, What is a thing?

We stared at the thing he said.

If too many things, there will still be another thing.

Sewer backup flooding the zone.

We avoided the professor’s face.

Now, who can see what we surely do see?

Here are some things: one damned whir after another.

Don’t look up. Manned, unmanned aircraft.

Another thing: blackberry clouds erupt. House fled downstream?

We’re finally on our own.

“Measured.” “Fair.” “Balanced.” “Debate.”

Call it like it isn’t. That’s a thing.

Items: cliff edge, my old fear of falling.

Why are these grey worms flying about, professor?

If it’s not one thing, not a thing, is it – what?

Spike at the throat, hidden lesion.

Say: it is what it is not.

The “both sides” of dead coins, like Indian Head pennies.

Name one thing I can put between my fingers.

Decency, maybe. Don’t laugh.

We Secured the Site

Ended! we think, and exorcise the ground,

driving our weapon-axes into stone.

Fractured rock flies. Inside that sound

we’re stone-bodied, split from feeling, gone.

We shut against the others. Yell

as the clocks darken from the reek,

when the blare locks down like a wall

and sits within the rubble. Someone speaks.

“In these waste circles, I seem more like waste

than my body would be, cut to shards.”

We’re stopped short. None of us owns that voice.

Its speech was nothing we could swear we heard.

Photo of David P. Miller

BIO: David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Nixes Mate Books published his Sprawled Asleep in 2019. His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Reed Magazine, About Place Journal, Tar River Poetry, Gramercy Review, Second Coming, The Ekphrastic Review, The Disappointed Housewife, and Nixes Mate Review, among other journals. David is a member of Boston’s Jamaica Pond Poets and co-directs their Chapter and Verse literary reading series. He is a member of the New England Poetry Club’s Board of Directors and is the recipient of a 2025 Tanne Foundation award.