Sabine Miller


Hypothesis

                               for D. Grey


A man spent one day and night hosing down giraffes and aoudads at the safari park; the preservation of wildness is something I cultivate; your absence is a cloud I take in as antidote; I prefer vapor to smoke because of the fires; I have yet to commit to a form or a position apart from my orbit of you and your obscuration-by-cloud — I disappear

and reappear endlessly for your salvation; a man spent one night and day of the fires with the zebras and antelopes, extinguishing, extinguishing: lost

his house to save his souls.

You Came to the Gate

                               to Rabindranath Tagore


You rose, a country and sundials pointing to you, pillar of body pillar of mind, the long pain gone or not yet come; you were a candle flaring in many chests; otherwise the mist is oppressive today; plum petals aren’t angels but they can be the gift; pure boredom purifies, pure restlessness: the displaced moment is the unearned gift; the wind blows, a petal falls, the wind blows.

Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground


I do not want to leave this ground, guitars would sing, if they could sing, of things of which we must not speak; the bottom of the mind’s a well of song, I do not want; I will go down to sing it there, a duet: the bottom and the breath, not yet poetry, not yet —

   .

As when he watched the fires behind closed eyes, not yet mournful, sang the water to the fire, the far near…

   .

Not yet, but night crisp as a cask, two owls calling, a skunk’s stink, the distance bridged of song, not a fixed constellation: a chord and a voice and whiskey, worn fingers on the frets, the wood warmed from fire; the cold listening for that note; it lingering; this ground.

Sabine Miller lives in a small town outside of San Francisco.
 
 
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