“If we were angels, bodiless and pure, we would sing for all eternity. Connie Colwell Miller’s poems wonder how the body, with its baggy wardrobe of needs, could ever permit such music. But the body is a means. And Miller’s poems are less about leaving the flesh behind and more about discovering how the flaws and desires of daily living operate to bring a second life out into the open.”
— Richard Robbins, author of Famous Persons We Have Known and The Untested Hand
"These poems
illuminate those ordinary moments which, taken together, compose a
life. “I think we have forgotten/ why we wear our bodies” is how
the collection begins, and subsequent poems remind us of the joys, as
well as the aches, of our physicality."
—
Minneapolis StarTribune
Bodywearers
Connie Colwell Miller
Smashwords Edition
Copyright (c) 2009 Skywater Publishing Company
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced in whole or in part
without written permission of the publisher.
Acknowledgements
"The Bodywearers," Applauze Magazine; "From the Basement Apartment of a Young Poet," Minnesota River Review; "How They Try to Sleep on a Bed That Is Too Small" and "My Father," Mankato Poetry Review
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Connie Colwell, 1976-
Bodywearers / by Connie Colwell Miller.
p. cm. - (Upper Midwest Writers Series)
ISBN 978-0-9793081-1-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-9793081-4-7 (e-book)
I. Title.
PS3613.I5334B63 2008
811'.6-dc22
2007027675
Photo Credits
Shutterstock, interior flourishes; Shutterstockocos Benedict, cover (green background); Shutterstock/Vansina Natalia, cover (stomach)
SOL BOOKS UPPER MIDWEST WRITERS SERIES
Bodywearers
Connie Colwell Miller
To my husband and my kids
for being the stuff
that's better than poetry
Table of Contents
The Bodywearers
The Wearing
Willow, Stove
Joseph's Real Indian Stuff
From the Basement Apartment of a Young Poet
Of Bedsheets and Underwear
The Distance Between
The Heartbreak of Fatherhood
In Loving Remorse
The Things I Do
Nudes, Reclined
The Tracheotomy
Our Mothers in the Other World
How They Try to Sleep on a Bed That Is Too Small
Old Hat
A View of the Night Sky from Duluth, Minnesota
Pike's Place, Downtown Seattle: The Last Stop
Weaknesses
A Boy's Life
The Best Words I Can Find
Of The Body
Living This Land
The Red-Tail on the Minnesota
There Is Something I Hear
Thanatophobia
I-94 Westbound through Minnesota
The Sweet Spot
My Father
Starting Fire in the Redwoods
Pine Bed on the Bank of the Baptism
A Poem for the Unborn
My Mother's Ring
Life
Milk
Loss
The Heron
The Road Trip
The Bodywearers
I think we have forgotten
why we wear our bodies.
We drag them from our beds
each morning and consider:
I am blonde. I am large.
I am scaly and yellow.
Look down. See the body
among the pillows? That
is not you, though you wear
it. See those hips and the knee jutting out
and the stem of that sex?
Neither is that you. Your body
contains you, a mite of sand
in the tongue of a clam.
Look there: a woman Titian
would have painted in long, lusty strokes,
dying for the figure of a waif.
Or there: the white girl who came of age
inside her Asian body.
Or this fragile man
in his huge man's case. We all
have this - this approximate us.
Stop it. You wear your body
because the wasp stings and
because the pebble wedges hard
between your nail and
the flesh of your toe. You
wear it to smell your lover's
hot breath and the skunk's
potent, unbearable stuff. To taste
the sweat in the valley between
her breasts, the bitter blade
of grass, the sourmilk musk
your daughter breathes. And to hear
the winter-stiff pines bristle in wind.
I say to you: Look at the pock
on my forehead. I am looking
at your small breasts, your blue
and nerveless tooth. And I am
throwing your body away. I will
strip myself to the core
for you. Or I can wear myself
the wrong way out. See the mole
on my back? I see the dappled flab
at your middle. We are what we are,
bodywearers only. So lay your body
over mine and use it. Use it and use it
until our souls spark like flints.
The Wearing
Willow Stove
— after Beckian Fritz Goldberg
My father was a willow. My mother was a
stove. Weathered, he bowed loosely toward
my upturned face, tickled my cheek, and re-stood.
She, stocked around the middle, and small,
used iron hands to untie knots and open
every coin purse. Rarely, he'd pull her
toward him and press his lips on hers
for show, and she'd tear away, bubbling
with anger. The floorboards creaked
from so much weighty pacing. Then, he'd
stand at the screen and love the storms, green his face
by the damp moonlight. She'd stir
potatoes at the stovetop, her slipper tapping
the dog bowl, and their fierce combustion - my life.
Joseph's Real Indian Stuff
- Taos Pueblo, April 2001
He pulls off an outdated pair of reading
glasses as I duck through the low adobe
doorway. He rises from behind the counter
like the moon. Long wrapped braids run over
the squares of his shoulders and halt
just above his enormous belly. He greets me
softly and not kindly: this is both home
and store. An earthen stove looms behind him.
I touch the fetishes with my fingertips,
the turquoise, the tiger's eye, the lined acoma pots.
He watches me, his glasses poised at
his side. His eyes are like thumbs on my
cheeks. I turn but they press against my back.
There is no noise louder than this
Pueblo silence. Even the dogs here do not
bark. I can bear it no longer.
As I leave, I turn to him, "Thank you."
But my words mend nothing: not this
soul-deep intrusion, not white fingers
playing over blood red clay. Not being large
nor being poor, not even the energy
lost in the simple act of enduring. Joseph
grunts and comes to life again, replaces his
glasses. Sits to work his crossword.
From the Basement Apartment of a Young Poet
I am reading, like always. Or, no,
I am sitting, arms raised in an M
behind my head. I am thinking
about reading. Poetry is maturity,
they tell me. It will come with age
and wisdom and learning to see
meaning in a patch of clover
over grass and a set of empty
swings. For the sake of the poem,
I should be outside, skitting
my toenails across the loose
grit of my driveway. But
I am sitting on my bed and
listening to the steady squeak of a bird
and the hum of the AC. There
is no meaning here, and if there is,
I will only see it later, around age
forty, they say. So I will read and fall
in love and be burned and
live more and come back here, and
I will see the scab of clover,
the smile of swing, and remember
how it meant loneliness, a green
summer in an empty room, and
a window-well, uterine, waiting for rain.
Of Bedsheets and Underwear
Morning enters, and I ease
soft into consciousness (the reel
of a dream claps its endfilm lightly
on the wheel). My lover's day
has begun. I sense it in the cool
freedom at my back and shoulder.
I pull the comforter close and breathe
him deeply in. I love this smell of male,
like fists of earth. Sour, private,
embarrassing (caught sniffing the blotch
of juice staining my panties).
This is his body's fragrance: sweat
and wear, heat and secretion. I open
my eyes and see more of it on the floor
beside my bed: his underwear, discarded, unfresh,
soft with wear and molded to the tender curve
of ass and cock, and (most perfect of all)
a dark stain in the boyish cups of cloth
that this grown man wears every day like skin.
The Distance Between
Today, you're tired of your lover's
hands. Of the way his touch bristles
the fine hair about your nipples. Tired
of your body and its arching need
to meet those hands. You're sick of your
idiot heart, straining at its box. Of
the quickening pulse beneath your
wrist when his lips part or his brows
crease in orgasm. Even your panties are tired
of their bureau and want to be pulled
out and dropped crotch-up on the carpeting,
stains and all. Most of all, you're tired
of remembering how he lay there
with your blood smeared up
his thighs like clay, thinking idly
of something so beautiful
that you were bored to tears.
The Heartbreak of Fatherhood
Evenings, you park your rig out back
and step indoors to wash the road
from your hands and face. These nights
you will be Daddy, the gruff figure your
daughter waits for beneath the dim kitchen
light. She is fresh from the bath, and to her
you smell of man, rough skin, and your
breath is warm on her nape before bedtime.
You, a man who has steered truck down 94
with only your knee, are also the man
who will feel the fine curve of your daughter's
buttocks as she sits on your thigh for storytime.
There is something about the way she tugs
absently at the edges of your fingernails. You
button a tiny button across the white down
of her spine, pull tight a purple ribbon
around a tail of fine hair. You will refasten
a bandage to a knee no thicker than your own
coarse wrist.
Then one day, beneath her tee, you will notice
the breasts, swollen and magnificent as grapefruit.
She will begin to walk, carried by the wide basin
of a woman's sturdy hips. She looks at you,
as through your own coal-black eyes, and the look
nearly strikes you down. And she says,
"You just don't understand. I'm not as pretty
as the other girls," and you - father, lover, child,
and man - will think, Her button, her hair, the amazing
fresh of her bottom, oh, this cruel and unjust world.
In Loving Remorse
I know what people say
about saving yourself for marriage.
I know how the hymen should burst
in consummation and how bastards
are made and then, haplessly,
born. I've heard the tight-lipped warnings
about the users, the players, the men
who want pussy, the men who invariably
"think with the wrong heads." And,
as it happened, you and I did not marry.
Nor did I marry the man before you or the man
before him. But I do not regret the love
we made, not in the hotel shower in Rapid
City, nor on the floor of my college dorm,
nor on the flat rock in the middle of the river.
Rather, I think, my love gets better
with each making. With each thrust, each
arch, each spiral toward madness. These
acts of love are not what I regret, not
the things I wish I'd saved for marriage.
I regret the words, those coins of love,
that never mean the same thing twice.
The Things I Do
Outside leaves blow crisp as husks.
If you were here I'd say,
It sounds like tide out there. Instead,
I snap pillows into cases, scour both
toilet bowl and check-tiled floor.
I curl my toes and make other quiet
movements you don't
see. Some things I cross off lists.
I think I yawn. Once or twice I lick
a finger, place a stamp, sneeze.
Afternoon arrives, same as where you are,
and I think you check your fridge,
drink from the spigot, grip the faucet long.
I think I see you square your shoulders
in the latticed noon-light, watch the wind clap
leaves together, and between them, small brown birds.
Nudes reclined
You are sleeping,
nude, in the morning sun
when I remember
your words from the night
before, "It just feels
good to be touched
by somebody, I guess."
Now the sun outlines
your shoulder, jaw,
ear, and arch of nose. Your lips
are puffed in sleep, lashes
like fat caterpillars
curled on each lid,
beads of mucous
in the corners where bits
of dream seep out.
Several curls
on your sternum,
like the private hairs
in drains, then
farther, a smooth two-sided brush