Jane Miller

We were up late and everyone had been drinking, and someone said, Hey, is that God’s head on the boil? We didn’t know where to look or what to think, it was obviously some sort of perverse joke, or not, right? And the conversation went on for days, sober, drunk, asleep, awake, what did it matter? Some of us felt the real time was for something, but what? And the questions kept coming, once they started, my favorite one being two strung together, What makes art “modern” and what does “urgent” mean now? Where was the greater good? That was another one bandied about, followed by Where was the common tent? which gave a feeling of empathy for a minute and then grief because, well, where was it? Will you arm, hoard seeds, go hungry? Those terrified me because, after all, who will repair things when the end is pale or dark? Where will you hide out when capital runs out, when water? Which will be greater, the heat or the cold? Wait, did God’s boiling head just say something? Cry out Go to hell from a giant lobster pot? Tantalizing us with where to go next? Are phosphorescent lamps to mark escape paths? Not that it’s not a great party, but whose place is this? Igniting quail in banana leaves, sons bandaged, who invited us? Why are the emerald bleeding and the ivory weeping? (Lower the freaking music.) Does anyone have the time?

March 10th and the snow flees like eloping brides into rain. The imperceptible change begins out of an old rage and glistens, chaste, with its new craving, spring. May your desire always overcome your need; your story that you have to tell, enchanting, mutable, may it fill the world you believe: a sunny view, flowers lunging from the sill, the quilt, the chair, all things fill with you and empty and fill. And hurry, because now as I tire of my studied abandon, counting the days, I’m sad. Yet I trust your absence, in everything wholly evident: the rain in the white basin, and I vigilant.