Classiness

This is worth noting:

    For Christmas, I wanted to buy my old pal Luke a bit of good pipe tobacco. So I contacted a place in his hometown of Seattle, Kirsten Pipe Company, and filled out an order for 2 oz of their best, then added on a whim "to an old friend with my compliments." Luke now tells me that when he got the package, it had a small white business card in it, along with the fresh tobacco, that read "Compliments of Alex Miller, Jr."
    You cannot get more classy than that. It's nice to know that this kind of coolness is being preserved somewhere in the world.

Cold, Cold

  The little thyme plant Dani and I have been trying to salvage is becoming what looks like a pile of dry green noodles beside our window. This is because it has been killed by the cold that makes it through. And the fact that THAT MUCH cold makes it through should be a sign to all Britain that the buildings you build are really damn poorly insulated.
  My cold has returned. Right in time for classes. Dani and I could see our breath in the bedroom this morning. As master of this small abode, I was not well pleased. My subject, the thyme plant, has perished. Scotland has begun to purchase emergency road salt from Africa. It is sunny outside, but somehow there is still sleet. Falling. Right now. It is a mortifying miracle. I can only shake my fist at the snowy castle. At least its suffering with me. And furthermore, it is a tourist trap. And dirty. Ha.
  The internet informs me that I will need to decide on a dissertation topic soon. Yeah, right. Any of my scholarly friends want to suggest something? I have a new idea every day, but the trouble I once got myself into with Yeats is still ringing like an alarm in my head. Paralyzing. Time for a sixth cup of mint tea.
   Luckily, a package arrived this morning with my books for the Modern Poetry class. Nice Faber editions of some of my favorite poets that I have hitherto been too cheap to buy? Check. Nice woman going to work while I sit on my butt and blog? Check. Big bucket of candy within arms reach? Check.
  Oh my gosh. I just realized that this all could have been written by a middle aged, lonely woman.

 Such is the poet's mind.
Here's a poem about a dangerous habit.


Imagining Heaven in January

What about Heaven’s geography?
Will the Hand of Paradise
wipe away the mountains like tears?

Will we forget, in the stillness
of a frozen river, the truth we learned
once from its ceaseless goodbye?

A snow that falls but never
meets the sea, will it fall there?
And on it a ship that has

no need of sailing, drifting close
to the spotless shore, accumulating
Heaven’s dust, as its

barrels of rotless spice
sleep inside, dreaming of
the deaths of flowers?

Here my imagination fails.
Looking to Heaven I see
only the greased colors

on the surface of its bubble.
The city is rittled with examples
of my kind of ignorance,

though not, as some would say,
in the laughing accordion man
who cares for nothing,

or in the limp carnival that
workers are hastening to
dismantle only to rebuild.

Trying to find an address
whose building we
have never seen,

my wife and I pass
a neoclassical statue,
clothed in barely-clinging

robes and snow,
looking serious, looking
toward no future

but the stony
inwardness of
herself.

A Debate

My friend Peri and I have had debate going on for awhile about the virtues of night people verses morning people. Though not really an argument, it made me wonder why some people tend to have loyalty to a time of day. I've long been telling friends that my least favorite time of day is noon, or whenever the sun is highest. I have no idea why--I think it may have something to do with the fact that color seems to me to be at its most washed out in the full, shadowless sun. There are exceptions, but as a general rule, I like the hours of transition best, when the light is moving, and most of all, the hour then the sun is rising. I have some friends who call the hour before sunset "the golden hour" because of the quality of light at that time in the mountains. They usually choose this hour to drink wine. What a good tradition! I remember when I was in high school seeing their mom in the front yard of their house, standing undeneath a tree with a glass of red, her hair caught in gold. I could go on, but let me just say that for me, to be walking around Edinburgh when the first orange light is hitting the rooftops and the towers is something else. Only the sea gulls stick around this time of year, and there's nothing to be heard but their high-up cries and the labored engines of the buses. I walk in the gardens and the sun comes up behind the huge bank building and the houses along the Mile. It leads almost inevitably to prayer.

        Anyway, the time difference between here and St. Louis provided Peri and I with a unique moment the other day. I was up pre-dawn, when the horizon was grey, and I noticed she was logged on to Skype. She was up, it being 2:30 am her time. So when we spoke, we were both at our prime hours. Our hair was messy, and we talked about books and Dani and distance. It was almost like time-travel. I've never been so struck by the wonders of the information age--go humans: I can be up late and up early at the same time.
        This, of course, generated a poem, into which the corn field behind Dani's parent's house in Michigan somehow also sneaked. See what you think.

Quiet Table
for Peri

Those who love night
and who love morning
love the same thing:
the silence that is heaped
on the edges
of the day,

the snow turned aside
by long hours of speaking.
And in the house, the table
with its blue cloth—or is
it winter light? where they sit
listening, sure that their parents sat here

before doing the same. Or are they my parents,
and am I listening? Still, there’s
always the table with a cup
barely warm, and ashes
in a dish that are the same
as worry and time.

There, whoever it is
that’s listening has to decide
if the snow is clean
or blackened, and what,
out of all this speaking,
we have made.

And does it compare with
the calm of a blue field
untroubled by the sun,
and the deer printing
from the woods on its east,
carefully, to those on its west?

picture: http://images-3.redbubble.net/img/art/size:large/view:main/2858013-2-empty-coffee-cup.jpg

Snow, my Thankfulness

I've been guilty lately of mono-media blogging. It doesn't seem like a stretch to believe that you'd like to discover more from this site about our lives here than you can get through my poems. Although I hope you've enjoyed them. This picture was taken from our window this morning. The past five or six days have looked about like this, something that the neighbors tell us is impossibly rare. There have been snowball fights, fallings down on the pavement, and lots of immature staring out the window while my wife was trying to tell me something. But she is from Michigan. I never get to see this kind of thing.

   I've written a few poems about snow falling through the light of street lamps. I've spent a few lazy days reading Lord of the Rings, as is my dork-custom at Christmas. Dani goes to work and comes back and we both smile. In the evenings, we walk the city (brighter than usual in the snow), and at one point wandered into the Princes Street Gardens, where we ice skated--or actually, she skated and I fell down a lot and grumbled about being pigeon-toed, which is not, really, the reason I am so bad at it. We've acquired a niece. I have breakfasted at the Two Thin Laddies, my favorite new coffee shop here in Tollcross, our little nook of Edinburgh. I have poked around the local bookstore. I have been absolutely useless to society. A waste of espresso and Dani's hard-earned money. That might be her big Christmas gift to me. And yet she has crammed the space beneath our little tree with what I'm sure are tasteful and generous gifts. As usual, I am able only to write a poem in response.

Snow shaking through the wash

of a street light. The way

words catch and don't catch

how a woman makes me feel.

The way she dances at the edge

of tongue and eye, because

whatever's moving her

is also moving them.

The snow is borne upwards again,

and goes to sleep finally

on the bald head of the mountain.

Walking in the morning, I see it,

and know how old man is, and yet

how young the earth, time,

and words, so that if I apply even

this well-hewn craft of speech,

attempting to say "her,"

it may as well be mute man

slamming rock on rock, trying

to give birth to thunder.

Giving Up

It was hard to stop not due
to the science of nicotine ingestion,
but because of the smoke hanging
over the Chattanooga I remember,

that clings elegantly over its river
in evening. A birthday party,
beer rings on pizza house tables,
a small wetness of street dew

in the bends of a good shirt.
It was difficult to stop,
because I couldn’t bang or tap
out the residue of a few faces,

because their ashes refused to clear
in the wind even of another country.
In that burnt flavor, there
is something of those over-

spent nights, wearing out
guitar strings. Something
of the slow, artful
southern dawn.