Tag: Jane C. Miller

Loneliness by Jane C. Miller

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

Loneliness

When you grow up on a farm, the farm
never leaves you, the handle of a bucket
heavy in your palms, the dipper’s metal
cool on your lips, the pitchfork’s lug
& heave, corn tossed row by row into
muscled memory’s ache. Even hay-
stacks sweated the morning dew.
Dirt caked hands, overalls, boots.
Sitting was lazy man’s work. Even
in retirement, you made reading
a task, your tongue-dampened thumb
paging through the news still fresh
at sunrise, your favorite time even
in frost, its hard grass crunch, barn door
creaking open the enclosed smells
of animals, their nicker & snort
made large in the quiet, you & the mule
smoking winter’s breath. Before hunger
made fast the hard work of chores, you
hungered for more. What was I then but
a vague wish, a witness only of
what came after, after you left.

*

Jane C. Miller’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals. A winner of the Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest and two state fellowships, she is author of the debut collection Canticle for Remnant Days (2024) and co-author of Walking the Sunken Boards (2019), both published by Pond Road Press. She coedits the online poetry journal, ൪uartet. www.janecmiller.com.

Two Poems by Jane C. Miller

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

In the Back Seat on I-70 when God Comes to Me at 12

Who’s to say it isn’t so, fog rising
off the Susquehanna at dawn, misting
the mountains; or maybe it’s

mountain fog falling into the river
as sun notches the peaks of the Alleghenies

and climbs down through dense firs,
waking what nests in them and me—

earth’s silent rotation, singing
even now across the span

of valleys, dim tunnels, past
sheer cliffs and rockfall, down

into the hard plains of Ohio
toward rain, corn husks shaking
dry their hair in afternoon light.

*

November

I walk past field stubble, stalks
black and broken, corn cobs chewed

down to rust; in the swamp, dead
eucalyptus where cormorants hunch.

This wetland, so cold and forbidding
cradles what lives: frog hearts

slow in their silted sleeping, mud
turtles prone on a bog of leaves.

My body ages into mystery. I face
dread, a snake skin in the grass. Molting

has shed its muscled menace,
head-to-tail a fogged diamond

pattern, delicate as church light.
An empty leash, I drag it home.

*

Jane C. Miller’s poetry has appeared in Kestrel, Apple Valley Review and Summerset Review, among others. A two-time recipient of a DDOA fellowship, Miller is co-author of the poetry collection, Walking the Sunken Boards (Pond Road Press, 2019) and an editor of the online poetry journal, ൪uartet (www.quartetjournal.com).