Post-

Poems

Wayne Miller

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781571319210
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"In incisive, jolting poems of the here-and-now, he takes measure of debt as a legacy, and the repercussions of constant mass shootings... Miller's poems are beacons." — Booklist Winner of the UNT Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award for Poetry The poems of this fourth collection from Wayne Miller exist in the wake of catastrophe. It is a world populated by rogue gunmen on shooting sprees, a world where the only inheritance a father has to pass on is his debt. In this world, every box could be a bomb and what comes after is what is lived. And yet, this painful past is not set in stone. The past becomes the present, yielding toward an immediate future. The collection coalesces around a series of "post-elegies" triggered by three occurrences: the birth of his child, the death of his father, and his experience of the seeming explosion of sociohistorical and political conflict and violence over the past decade. Throughout this series, Miller processes grief, but also cuts through pain to open up a way forward in the aftermath of shared loss. Post- thrums with pathos and humor, pain and the beauty of living. "Part stark elegy where the ghosts we carry are relentlessly tied to us, part unrelenting look into today's world of social media, loneliness, and violence, and part fierce celebration of survival, Post- is a gorgeous and complex book of poems that both startles and soothes." —Ada Limón

A BREATH IN THE RECORD

(1806 . . . 1912 . . . 2009)

Down in the record’s

spiraling thread

the Titanic

has sunk, Madero

is president

of Mexico. Sun

Yat-sen’s

Chinese Republic

has blotted out

the patterns

of the Qing Dynasty.

In Tyler, Texas,

Dan Davis

has been burned

at the stake.

The Olympics

are over,

Tiger Stadium

is open! These

are always the case—

———

while down in the record’s

spiraling thread

sixty-two musicians

are cramped

inside a blank

studio, their instruments

nearly touching,

positioned toward

the whirlpool

of the recording horn.

The opening

chord is dominant

———

and inside each note

(a floating seed)

the fourth Peace

of Pressburg

is a canopy

over Austria,

the Cherokee Treaty

of Washington

is signed. Cape

Colony is British,

a sky of water

fills the Pontcysyllte

Aqueduct,

Lewis and Clark

have turned

toward home.

———

Below the Leonore

Overture No. 3

is the Leonore

Overture No. 2—invisible

through the milky

blur of silence

between them

(blur of the world

in motion). While

these notes—pushed

through the screen

of an afternoon

in a white room

in May (a fire

will burn

Constantinople)—

hover here inside this

the moment

of the poem

(Bill Clinton

is on a plane

from Pyongyang,

Orly Taitz

fills the news).

———

Then—right there—

we can hear

one flautist take a breath—

just an instant

———

before the same air

rushes out and over

the lip of the mouthpiece,

down through

the silver tube

and into the chord

lifting now

from the orchestra—

a held tonic.

His body expanding

around that one

brief second

sealed in the spiral—

that gulp

the O...