Of the Act of the Mind
I want a brighter verse for this
memory as slippery
as light sliding across our ceiling
from a car driving down
Bowl Road one winter night past
supper it’s of my father
I can’t see him I am lying
on his chest my right cheek
buried in blue flannel I am
half in a sleep half in the pale glow
of a color Zenith in the old house
in Chelmsford where still
I feel my body rise and lower
and rise then lower rise and lower
upon his breath with the mechanical
constancy of the music box
snow globe he bought at an airport
or our kitchen clock or one day
his ventilator then something like water
that is not water fills my lungs
–First published in Five Points Journal
Matt W Miller is the author of Tender the River, winner of the Independent Publishers of New England Book Award, a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Provocateur Award, and the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award. Other books include The Wounded for the Water, Club Icarus, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and Cameo Diner. He was a winner of Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Prize, the Poetry by The Sea Sonnet Sequence Contest, the River Styx Micro-fiction Prize, the Iron Horse Review’s Trifecta Poetry Prize. A former Walter E Dakin Fellow and Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, he lives with his family in coastal New Hampshire.