What Miller Said

I’ve got 6 pages left in my Miller Williams anthology. I’m writing because I don’t want to finish. I’ve been milking this book for quite some time now. Of course, this is the problem with getting a book with everything the author has written. It’s not like I can wait for the next CD to come out. My only chance to find something new is the unlikely discovery of some unpublished manuscript. Far more likely is that this, that which I’ve nearly finished reading, is everything some old man from Arkansas has to say to me. The courses of our lives intersected for some 271 pages, I took and did not give back, and soon I will say goodbye. Sure, I can read the book over at some point. It will be like remembering an old friend. But, let’s face it, looking through a scrap book will never be as good as living the experience the first time around, before it had to be cut up, disfigured, and glued to pages of an album. True, I will change and maybe next time I pick up the book, I’ll take away different lessons. The trouble is that the book will not change. The cover may collect some dust, but the ink will not alter its shape. What’s worse, the words will always sound the same.


10,000-Year-Old Tree Discovered
Shades Two and a Half Acres

This tree took root before Jerusalem,
Before Troy, before Constantinople,
Before there were cities to name,
Before there were farms,
The most ancient living thing on earth
For all we know,
Which may mean also in the universe.

So listen to this and tell me
How it grabs you:
Come let us open the door
To your new home
Where you can lead your guests across a floor
Older than Rome.

I Think Jerusalem is older but it doesn’t rhyme.
Anyway, poets use Rome to mean a really long time.



It Came to Pass on a Planet
Third from a Minor Sun in the Solar System
Out on the Edge of One of the Galaxies


If there are intelligent beings
In some other place
Did Jesus go to be born
And die for them there?

If he didn’t
Are they still offered the grace
Of God and if they aren’t
Is that fair?


I also liked the poem entitled, “The Last Man to Speak His Language is Dying” because I never thought about the fact that such people will exist. I liked the poem entitled “Divorce” about the man who faked his own death then snuck into the crawlspace of his own house during his funeral service to get away and stay close at the same time, listening to life go on without him. I liked the line “It’s you and I against the world my love,/The world is/I have to tell you/a prohibitive favorite.” I like how that first lines flows and how the rest is staccatic. I like how he sometimes talks about everyday stuff. I like how he sometimes talks about the big things. I especially like how he can talk about both at the same time:

I overdramatize somewhat. There’s nothing bricks,
a hoe, some putty, nails, and luck can’t fix.
Almost everything is redeemable.
The dog and I are not.

Time sometimes heals the mind
and the metaphorical heart
but ravages all the while the bones and the hair
and the poor, sad, fleshy part.


Having once been, as my brother liked to say, “an ivory tower intellectual,” turned blue collar worker (of sorts), I appreciate the importance of both ways of speaking and thinking.

I like also how I look up to him as an older, wiser person, having experiences or sentiments that I have yet to encounter:

I could say I love you but I don’t.
Love is more substantial than I am.

On self-referential action:
I let him do it because it made me feel good
To have somebody think that way about me.
It had nothing at all to do with him.

Now, re-read the above lines with the pronoun “her” substituted for the pronoun “him” and see if it still makes sense. It didn’t to me. I couldn’t be sure if that was because of some bias I have or because of something true about the world. Maybe something true about women, or men, or just me in particular. Then again, maybe it was something true about how men write about women, or about how a man reads something written about a woman by a man. But if it's about the world, more than readers and writers, then I wondered if some of us are simply better at externalizing that which is internal, while others tend to internalize that which is external. I wondered if it is of any philosophical or psychological significance that the only female smurf carried around a mirror all the time. I think about male conceptions of Justice and Science and how they purport to be objective, which is to say, without an internal element, and I then wonder of the alternative notions of the same, based perhaps on compassion and intuition. How different would things be then? And how low a position on the totem would I then occupy, he who has an incredible ability to extricate self from all judgment?

I like the line:

He’s tired of everything that humans know.
He longs to know what no one ever knew.

I also liked the story about the old lady that fell out of love with her husband out of fear he would die first and she would miss him too much. She cautioned:

You get too used to being half of something.

I guess it's a little like that here, no? I don't wanna finish the book because I have grown accustomed to being the recipient of those slow moving, Arkansan spoken words.