errol miller
Palace of Smoky Light
Symbols and texts
a cousin on piano, the evening
flows like alluvial Delta silt, all
the comings, all the goings, outside the window
of this nostalgic Occidental time and place
another obscure widow is stalking us: soon
it will be suppertime in Southside Bars&Grills
soon old mates from Oxford will demurely sniff
twilight's wisteria scented air and moan ecstatic
and we'll turn our faces away, politely grieving
among the thistle and the thorn, the hickory
and the white-oak, let us praise
the rhythmic hours that have passed, let us
congregate at the Jordan
and stare black-faced at its ripples
tomorrow, in the morning, a new blue way
similar to Chicago in the wintertime, already
its borders are opening like Granny's calla lily
already our sleep comes easily, the mundane repetition
of existence demanding things in their places
forsaking scientific knowledge and vague presumptions
for a favor with a favorite God, much ado
about the Promised Land, its milk and honey
golden streets and stucco colonnades, so
many different routes to Sanctuary, so many
literary bookstores closing shop, this precise poem
of man's bumble-bee demise
will not counterbalance anything, here
an arm, a leg, to rural Loveland via New Hope
in the linear language of the supreme
we'll find Southern slang, the limits of
the sweetness of Dixie's sad cafes
in the darkness of three a.m.
there is a river, so the prophets say
running out of Des Moines on sleepless nights
I have heard its narrative voice, flashbacks
as they were, to the grotesque horror of Atlantis
a tedious bridge for memory's sake
embedded in the consciousness of some
these keepsake survivors, writers of fiction
purveyors of truth, collapsing
into the framework of a palace of smoky light
where today meets yesterday and tomorrow
and the expressive isolation of imminent change
is mirrored in the journey of the traveler's
crooked way to Homeplace.
