Long ago, when we met, and had toseparate, you sent a pictureof you squatting by a river,bathing, your face half-turned, lookingover your shoulder beyond meinto a monastery, and beyond that,daughters hanging threadbare laundry.We were ourselvesso young. I longed for your return,and in springtime, although the wildflowerswere few, we lived together.Hundreds of firefliesaccompanied us in dream,swarming in the birchesout the uncurtained windows.They alarmed us, and the cries of returning geesedrove us farther under the covers.We never stopped talking of their beauty,although the years parted us forever.In the full moon’s lighton an empty bed,the white geese, melting snowand firefly glow dissolve.I forgot to give you a parting gift.Then silence. Not to be confused with emotion.Anise rises from the village.And a missing apricot treebecomes as massive as the past.The five white petals of its blossomsurvive as I do,as spring energyin an aging body.Another night of a big moon.I roll in and out of its light, wondering,late autumn, how is itthat I could lose my first loveas carelessly as a line of versethat made the whole work.Not that art perishes.Nor is loveonly about pleasure.I still need to thankthe old gods in the rocky earthfor all that has happened.This stick will have to be a tree.
The Missing Apricot Tree
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- December 21, 2023
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“The Missing Apricot Tree” from PAPER BANNERS: by Jane Miller.
Published by Copper Canyon Press in November 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Jane Miller.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Valyntina Grenier
Jane Miller has written twelve books, most recently Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions, and including Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel. She has performed her creative work and lectured on literature and the fine arts at universities, colleges, libraries, community centers, and public arts venues for over thirty years. She is the recipient of a Wallace Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Western States Book Award, and the Audre Lorde Award. Miller served as a professor for many years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona—including a stint as its director—and as a visiting poet at the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers in Austin.
A herald of desire, suffering, mortality, and the mission of poetry itself, Jane Miller’s Paper Banners “say[s] the cosmos / isn’t hostile. / Yet strangles a dove / with one hand.” Against this angst, Miller steps outside of history to contemplate voices of love, aging, and artmaking. Many poems are addressed to family members, friends, and young poets, or pay homage to familiar figures taken by time or tragedy, including Virginia Woolf, Osip Mandelstam, and the Song Dynasty poet Li Qingzhao. In clear, short lines, these poems harken to ancient banderoles, or pennants, which announced rallying cries on the lances of knights and mottoes on the flags of ships. Here, Miller’s Paper Banners is made of images of the American Southwest and scrutinizes its political and physical landscape. Like skywriting streamed in white smoke, this collection bears its message on the wind, its words addressed to anyone. As Miller catalogues the intimate experiences that make up a life—friendships, loves, dreams, our human connection to the environment—Paper Banners becomes a hope that “what will survive of us is love.”
“Excellent . . . Miller is able to go inside her subjects and draw readers with her. That experience makes this collection one for all libraries.”
—Diane Scharper, Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
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