Excerpt from Eat Quite Everything You See

THE ANARCHIST

Only on the way to evening does the sea
begin to come back, the hills between here

and there, which were sharply green, attentive
all day, go blue. Great blots of shadow appear

where Aleppos shelter succulents. At evening
the harbor too comes back, its white blear

warming with yellow, each roof slant and wall
stripe clarifying into the somewhere they are

but weren't in our minds all day because the light
doesn't allow the eye that far in summer.

Little silver fish of a plane sliding east,
boat flecks unfastened from their distances

materialize with evening. Possible roads
emerge, meander, disappear; windows flare

like stolen squares of the way the water will,
at last, return. We will never see people on the coast,

not at this reach, but we see what the light does
to them, which is more than they know of us.

We are less than shadow to them, crouched
on the south side of a mountain. We lose the light

before they and are safe. The promontory
of our village is a prow, and we echo the sea

so it cannot detect us. Our noise. Our bread
breaking. The damp stones inside our houses

silence all sunder and flux. Those who live
down by the sea return to it at night, and we study

their spilled light, imagine their music, which is better
than actually hearing it. We know it is impossible there

also, cool water standing aside for the Pastis. There too
they love the cloud rising in the glass. At that edge

they drink to bring on the sadness more sweetly;
here we drink to fend it off. Either way, the body

of water is one of the oldest in the mind. Believing
begins near it. There color was born and given

its beautiful names: Cobalt, Cadmium, Cerulean,
Napoli Yellow, Hansa, Ocre, Nuance de Bleu.

The houses could be rocks, the rocks could be roads.
The boats could be doubts or birds. That's what

art is for: to remind us that we have not seen
what we remember having seen. If I say

Mediterranean to you now, all this will freeze
into azure, and you will lose the richly actual

to mere knowledge, the terrible stillness
that keeps the eye from going too far.

CAUTIONARY TALE

for Heid Erdrich

My friend believes that people looked
a long time at the way storms took the land,
the magnificent bruising a brutish sky
could give the earth, the green's appalling swift
submission to moister air, the way the wind
could bully or breeze Ð and she is sure

this is how we learned the art of ravishing.
I wish I could agree with her, but I wasn't born
this far north, cannot trust how long it takes
the spring to come. It scares me, how frost
stalks night after night, how every other year,
something fails completely to go on. Gardens thin,

pavements buckle with melt, and rivers going north
forget themselves, sprawl, unlovely, muddy
perfect strangers' beds. And though I don't believe
my friend, I've accepted life alone here, stopped
making my bed, expecting guests. I see how
my cottonwood refuses every year to dress until

the end of May, and autumn too, that one's last
to shed its underthings. The shrubs and hostas
have no shame, frill early, and the trillion tulip
wands too soon bend and quit, but the reluctance
of the trees is almost wise, or simply practiced.
If my friend is right, I cannot lend them human traits,

but take example from them as I drive along the freeway
pushing them with wishes into what they could
become, afraid of what the air has done. Ravished
by the wind and left for dead too many years to count,
those wily silver olives leaf one tight fist at a time,
so late it's hardly worth the bother for such a casual fling,

and when I push unwilling green along in the drafty
copse of my desires, I know it is afraid of something
bigger than not blooming, that my own reluctance
can't be blamed on any silly disappointing past,
but on this very landscape's bad example, dour,
dormant most of every year, all heartless self control.

ONE MOON VIEW OF PUGET SOUND

I loved a boy and green water dared near my feet,
roses fell apart in my hands, stones turned their troll
shoulders and said go ahead, stumble.

And I did. All the green days I combed my straw-colored hair
and patted my eyes with creme. All the warm days I hid
my dragons in a fen of remembered trees.

We went to the edge of his mother, but I wasn't invited
to drink. He washed my ribs with a long hand, dressed me,
tied my shoes upside down and tight.

I loved a boy in a house that wasn't mine. The sun bled most
beautifully going off, and stars bounced like unstrung
beads on the porch floor. I gave him views given to me.

We loved a dog that wasn't ours, pulled limp sheets
above our heads against slithers of light, skin that wasn't
ours, pillows and dishes and lettuce and basement steps

that weren't ours, windows and closets and high ceilings
in deep pink rooms, green bricks, white cups full of being
not ours. The animals belong to a child younger than all the years

between us. Somewhere a clock I never found still ticks.
Comes a time in loving when there's nothing to tell, but that the light
was right, and the rain behaved. I loved a boy and the gulls wept

inside a fog. Nothing happened except that I couldn't remember
the name of the flower I loved best in that city, hydrangea,
hydrangea, hydrangea, blues and violets so unnatural

it hurt to see them swelling at the steps and railings, holding
the hills up. Salmon thrashed through us toward the streams
of their birth, gaping red slashes where they'd leapt

over rocks and piers and come back down behind
where they were going, scales and fish flesh streaming away
in the backwash. Purple coins of the money bush.

I loved a boy because there was a long bandage of water
and dark enough for me to smell everything again. His father
said he knew a story like this, and it was good.

He must have made Spokane by noon. Between love
and lust is a green fish, swifter than ever you'd guess,
a wish of wings. I'll go home to Russian olives,

books and eager autumn, but I cannot look into the face
of anyone young without hearing freighters scraping piers, a door
nosed open by a cat who wants to walk on that mist.

I loved a boy and nothing changed. I knew already
what tenderness was, how breath collects behind the knees
and two bodies begin to need different skins.

My hands are brown as leather and not new. I turn
them palm u so they match anyone's. Come now,
I'll dress you for all the days ahead. I'll hold

your feet like heavy blooms about to fall apart.
I loved a boy and lost nothing except momentum.
Ferries polish away the fog and the islands hunker

while something, is it wind?,rocks the wicker rocker.
A house here and there blinks out of the fog, and I can tell you
this which was once secret: I've wanted anyone's child all along.


NATURE MORTE

A small scorpion kicks, caught in a spider's web
over the desk where I am expected to write
as many great things as possible with the gifts of time
and this famous light. Somewhere my mother has read
that lavender repels scorpions, and she advises me
of this is a letter, as if it were a tip for removing blood
from a fine lace, blood she knows I would otherwise leave,
as I do the scorpion, to rust into a souvenir.
Perhaps she has also read that lavender opens the taps
of male desire -- but that, she keeps to herself.

The scorpion hangs here exhausted, the elegant comma
of its tail rooted, pincers open, its fringe of legs spilled
in air. It will take days for the quiescence the spider
desires -- her splayed limbs slight, and crooked as scratches
or the invisible joints of a skeleton's unlocked knuckles --
but rhetorical as the long muscle-wrapped arm that reaches
for God on the domed chapel ceiling, one finger fully extended
with the knowledge that what it reaches for is obtainable.
In one of the scorpion's surrenders to languor, the spider
ascends to him gently -- I've no idea what she intends --

this being a foreign country, and I here in the woods with
no library or book to tell me whether she'd like him dead
or simply alive but paralyzed. She moves to the still point
of the tail's end, where she sketches thin descriptions
of the deadly part -- she's so light in her hunger,
he doesn't seem to know that she's there until she's on him.
The web, designed for balance so true, stillness and movement
are one, gives as he curls his spine, pincers and tail spired
above his back, the free legs treading air and rocking them both
-- though lightly, because her web, after all, is a soft place.

I don't have to tell you how much I'd like her to have him,
how I admire the bright strings of glue she's strapped
on his corded segments, every bead of his bulk and swagger.
She's got his right pincer wrapped in her opal gauze,
and the stinger. She makes her patient runs down
the invisible ladder of her hunger and throws another
rope around his amber hind leg, pins it to the arch
of his torso. He's strung up like a puppet, the free
pincer clasping the air with its tiny tongs, trying to clip
the cord on the other, but every time he touches himself, he sticks.

It is still possible that the spider will squander three days
and all her threads on the scorpion, then, that I,
forgetting her, might simply close the flimsy curtain
over my desk on which she's built her web. If I were
to take a lover suddenly. One simple sweep of cloth across
the plane, a gesture to satisfy my hunger rather than hers --
and they'd both be on the floor, he running, trailing
her broken threads and missing the use of any of his eight legs still glued with her sap. It might have been easier for her,
were it a fly, a mosquito, but no, it is this -- a monster

which looked yesterday like luck, and today like possible
catastrophe. The foolish scorpion has lifted his free left arm
to pinch the wire that holds his right, and now, that one too
is glued. By morning, he's stopped thrashing, strung up
by the end of his tail alone. She's unwrapped the mitt
of gauze from his pincer, touched it lightly to the other.
Though he's not dead. Nor does it matter now if and when
he does die: it's the shape she's made of him that graces me,
a gesture: the beads of his tail, the blue bow of his back
and tiny amber bubbles of his underparts -- she's turned him

into a rosary let down from the hand bead by bead,
still warm with the pressure of prayer. 

Copyright 2002 by Leslie Adrienne Miller. All rights reserved.