Sample Poems by Peggy Miller
Triticum aestivum:
Fields of Wheat, Fields of String
Certain theories are amenable to test:
Iron filings curve for a magnet.
Saw dust does not. Eggs exuded
from a frog become frogs. It's been seen.
But strings, those mythic cosmic building blocks
pulsing in their separate amplitudes
can never be verified against our common reality.
Strings are like superscript,
bits without a place on the line.
We are too big to crawl down into crevices
that hide the little loops in their quarks,
so tiny--so much less than any infinitesimal--
they hum their music in only two dimensions--
and we do not hear the symphony.
Is it all fancy--or is that where the spirit dances,
stringing along in a billion unknowable loci,
apart from the scope of body?
Or is the mind the thing,
the glue that makes these trillion cells a One,
miracle enough that we can look out
at the stars that made us?
I have no idea. I may never know.
Somebody had to stay and grow the wheat.
Somebody had to make the crumb buns.
Bufo americanus:
Snow Storm
Midnight darkness seeps into the bedroom
dissolving the distal edges of furniture and books
which, in the morning, will rise restored.
Inanimate stuff, I think. Damned inanimate stuff.
When I am gone it will keep the flakes of me
that presently slough, invisible--
Wherever I walk a constant cloud falls away,
hair, skin, breath, salt, oil paintings of the maze
of my fingertips, singular as snowflakes.
Where am I going? I have unbraided myself
and been knotted into children whose paths
have clung and then diverged. I have dipped my hands
in the Mediterranean, and bathed in Rome. I slept
in tiny German villages, and sat on the beach
in Honormore California, trading salt with the Pacific.
I held a toad smaller than my fingertip
and let it go free again near Euony Pond in '68.
All that was me has spread beyond knowing.
Except in the dark expanse between atoms,
I never began nor ever was some constancy of self,
and I will never end.
Prunus persica: What The Blood Knows
if there is a river
more beautiful than this
bright as the blood
red edge of the moon
--Lucille Clifton
Guardian to the ashes of stars
she is ocean, the tides, the stream
that watches and nurtures, the flow that holds.
Having wandered lost the slow mattings
of capillaries, rushed in venial hallways flooded
in a radiance of peach leading not toward home--
in her fluid ways she has no home--
toward only increments of future
in pulses-- enduring the hungry touch
of every cell, the heart-thrust echoing
in the red engine room deep
in the recesses of her vessel, she knows
in the black measure of universe whispering
among her corpuscles there is only local time,
brief and brittle, and this is her body.