Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Unsung Air 

A chill moves in, objectivity deepens; 
darkness narrows into pinpricks the last source of light.
In black air lies the perfection of my outstretched hand, unseen,
          minus shadow,
     a voice pronounces shape- 

Words stand apart, and in the absence of music, rain, or wind,
     a monstrous, rounded silence.

Darkness has its own depth, marked by folds and edges,
     dimensions/substance/material- 
In giddy darkness, soft prelude to rain, 
     behind the storm, possibility shimmers; a flicker, the suggestion
          of a note before the note.

Christmas Lambs

By the road in the meadow, 
a dozen lambs, still damp from birth, 
umbilical cords dangling 
like flourescent pink roots from soft undersides,
stagger on black legs through the frosty grass.

It's the first day of winter
on the North Coast,
a wet world of lush green, and unexpected white.
This morning snow fell (in a place where snow never falls)
into the ocean, 
and over the trees, covering the redwoods in lace.

The lambs, uncomplaining, shiver and suckle.
They know nothing other than this,
and believe in 
the glistening green meadow dotted with lumps of white,
the sly and frosty radiance of blue sky above, 
golden light slanting down sharply through the snowy sugar pines,
their mothers force?bred out of season.

A ewe, trailing her placenta like a bloody flag, 
rump swollen from the birth,
glares with a stupid woolly sheep face,
ridiculous and pathetic in her pain.
In the spring she will cry incongruously
for her twin lambs sent to slaughter.
Then she will be bred again.

How easy it is to be fooled into 
miracles.  New life, innocent lambs, 
golden sun.  The excitations of nature, 
an ocean inexplicably full of snow. 
Joyous, we can't imagine that exact moment 
weeks from now when the snow vanishes like a dream,
and the Christmas lambs are hacked to pieces
any more than know how crazy 
luck can quickly pierce our own lives
on a glorious Christmas morning,
trouble sharp and shining just beyond the treetops.

Wonderful Animals

Footprints faint in headlights
prove I've been down this road before,

redwoods, sugar pines, tan oaks,
and madrone rise up like ghosts in the ocean fog.

The cat presses its nose against the car window,
trying to recollect by scent.

Exhausted, I rely on lists where memory fails:
bedding and clothes stacked in pine-scented drawers,

glass jars of copper pennies on shelves,
sacks of coffee, sugar, salt, beans, rice, flour.

Things I can count on; I work to memorize
how I've provided for myself. 

Thickets of dense brush have grown up,
the cabin floats in cobwebs, impervious to ocean storms.

In the cold salt air I sleep like a corpse,
a premonition hovering like a bat in the open window.

One moonless night with fog drifting in
I hear men's voices vertiginous in the woods,

catch a flash of lantern light,
tremble as steel-toed boots crash across the porch.

Any moment, I know I will be 
little more than a deer flayed on a rack.

My life distills into lists I'd leave behind: 
oranges, tea, milk, bread, eggs, butter, 

sand, sun, wind, salt, fish, rocks, shells, and sea.
I crouch on the steps, ballbat in hand,

the cat's tail fattening with terror.
In this way the forest tricks,

a buck crashing out of the trees, 
his heavy gallop across the porch,

someone's out of breath dogs scrambling in hot pursuit.
The voices had been as distinct

as the headlines in tomorrow's paper:
Woman Murdered in Remote Coastal Cabin.

Later, by candlelight I added to the list: cheese, fish, lemons,
peppers, chocolate, jam, wine, artichokes.

Wings

I'm making love with an angel
and the very brightness of her body
illuminates the room
until I realize it is the time of year
the sun sets early
and I have fallen asleep on the couch.
Two cats wind their limber bodies under my knees
and over my chest.
Driven by hunger, their purrs deafen.
I await some other sign,
as darkness descends and we three
fall into shadow,
momentarily at rest.
I hold out my hand 
and touch first fur and then feathers.
One cat has brought me a bird,
a gift, still warm, he offers 
to stave off my hunger. 
I dream myself awake,
get up, and carry the feathered 
mound with broken neck out to the garden.
At the windows the cats watch hungrily,
luminous eyes in unison,
as I open up the earth
and lay the body in,
carefully folding the wings
so as not to break them.

Missing Blue

In that long-forgotten space
lurk our phantoms, two cliches wrapped with a twist.
She, penniless, roaming the Centre Pompidou,
he falling into step to condemn Bad Art.
She weepy in love with a man cast aside
on Modigiliani's tomb, he with the agitated attention span
of a jealous, new lover.

The elevator's wrought-iron cage creaking upwards,
the long hallway reduced to darkness if we weren't quick enough
     for the light.
Fresh produce spilling to the buckling floor,
the key broken off again in the door.
The old French landlady
cursed us to the heavens.

All winter your paint-stained fingers
made arpeggios in the gessoed room, 
haloed in smoke from roll-your-owns, 
I danced arabesques, cleaned my ears with the tips 
of paint brushes, your jars of turpentine stored in the bidet.

That whole fin de siecle thing got tangled in our bedclothes,
we were decades too late for this,
but Love is its own fiction,
the winding, snowy streets shimmering
under pretenses of fallen light.

There came the time I wearied of it all,
lyrically, I might add,
like a poignantly lit apple posed
in the center of a still life.
How frantic love must be on foreign ground.

Long after many versions of above,
fractured cathedral spirals and broken gargoyles long ago 
     receded,
our love beating on like a sad old heart,
you chased me home, and I said yes, yes, yes
with the desperation of someone stanching blood.

It ends on a canvas,
solitary seated figure-stern, minus chair- 
a tense fractured mosaic of blinding yellows and browns, 
not me at all,
but when I protested,
you peeled it from the frame
and hurled it like a missile through the air.

Love Is A 45

Ain't now way for me to love you, baby, 
if you won't let me . . . . 
      -Aretha Franklin

Alyce Miller was born in Switzerland, grew up primarily in Michigan and northern Ohio, and then spent most of her adult life in the San Francisco Bay area. She currently lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where she is a professor of English and creative writing in the M.F.A. program at Indiana University. She is also an attorney with a special interest in animal rights. She is the author of a collection of stories, The Nature of Longing (University of Georgia Press, 1994), and a novel, Stopping for Green Lights (Doubleday, 1999). Her fiction has received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence in Fiction, the Lawrence Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, and distinguished citations in Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories. More than 100 of her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in literary journals and magazines. 
"Wonderful Animals" was first published in River Styx, "Wings" first appeared in Ascent, "Love Is a 45" and "Christmas Lambs" in High Plains Literary Review, "Missing Blue" in Mangrove.