Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, CENTRIPETAL, by JANE MILLER


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

CENTRIPETAL, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: This time if there is time if time
Last Line: Remains.
Subject(s): Absence; Longing; Love - Loss Of; New Mexico; Separation; Isolation


This time if there is time if time
embodies a true story, I'll tell you the truth.

So well do I know you
that were I blindfolded and led about the summer beach

I could tell what part of it I was
standing on from the perfume where you'd been,

that olive skin moist like the shore,
as a child the fairest in Athens, up early to escape

to school with your satchel in the shadowless glare.
Go friend. The southwest wind blows across the Cape

with the constancy of a parent, and the heart-shaped
air sacs ripen to iodine and a blackish-brown.

Everywhere the stony smell of dry sand and hot salt grass
should remind you of home.

What I thought all winter were pebbles I see now
are snails impregnated on the rock. I can smell them

three thousand miles away in Santa Fe like the one
thing you can't smell on yourself, your breath.

Although I don't get used to it, I think
of you making love with another with tenderness.

Among ponderosa and joshua, among juniper,
I play the piano attentive to the whole piece, like sky.

The sunset is lavender and gold, equipoised between three peaks,
slate, fire, and pearl. Stepping outside in the ashes

I call in the dogs, and with them a race of gods transformed
to maize gathering the meager end of summer rain.

These obsidian Apache tears I found in Sedona to bury
with you in the East. They say rather than die

by another, men leapt from the mountain weeping these
stones. I know how deeply one can look

into your eyes, and down there perhaps you must be
lonely without me. Among the mosaic

of the Taos range, proud Wheeler Mountain and the Sangre de Cristo
chain, yucca blooms like desire equal to the sun

rousing it. If memory serves me,
I cup your sculpted face and loosen

your hair as you stoop for the bath. I live
the risk of the romantic. Nothing can save me,

who takes leave of you for love
remains.





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