Post- - Wayne Miller

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      He entered through the doorway of his debt.

      Workmen followed, bringing box after box

      until everything he’d gathered in his life

      inhabited his debt. He opened the sliding door to the yard—

      a breeze blew through the spaces of his debt,

      blew the bills from the table onto the floor.

      The grove of birches and, farther,

      the beach of driftwood and broken shells

      were framed by the enormous window—

      that lenslike architectural focus of his debt.

      He drove into town on the coiled springs

      of his debt; when he bought fish at the market

      he proffered his MasterCard. The dark woods

      stretching inland were pocked by lightfilled cubes

      of debt. The very words he used to describe

      his surroundings were glittering facets

      of debt. Each visit, we smoked on the deck

      and, over drinks, he reminded me

      with love and genuine pride: one day

      all this debt would be mine.

      After the plane went down

      the cars sat for weeks in long-term parking.

      Then, one by one, they began to disappear

      from among the cars of the living.

      ———

      When we went to retrieve his

      you drove the rows of the lot

      while I pushed the panic button on the fob.

      ———

      Inside, a takeout coffee cup

      sat in its cradle,

      a skim of decay

      floating beneath the lid.

      I’d ridden in his car

      many times but never driven it.

      ———

      When I turned the key

      the radio

      opened unexpectedly,

      like an eye.

      ———

      I was conscious of the ground

      passing just beneath the floor—

      and the trapped air in the tires

      lifting my weight. I realized

      I was steering homeward

      the down payment

      of some house we might live in

      for the rest of our lives.

      We place our blanket—

      the child inside you

      and you and I

      radiating from her.

      We open our books;

      the arbor curls over.

      Then: swallows

      skimming the surface

      of the field

      as if on lines, glinting

      like hydrofoils

      cutting a bay.

      Today we saw

      the child move sharply

      in the dark of you—

      though still

      just sand in a screen,

      her 2-D cockpit.

      And now: swallows

      scratching lines

      on the glass of the air.

      To the child curled

      in her window

      of sound

      we are nothing.

      We watched her heart

      blur and unblur—

      a deepwater vent.

      See the birds

      skim the field, then rise

      to the trees: that one,

      now that one—

      dozens of them

      dipping and cutting

      in Romantic abandon,

      such flawless

      precision!—

      (Let’s remember:

      this is how they feed—)

      1

      The new parents rose

      to throw stone after stone

      into the pond. The moonlight

      barely touched them.

      The surface erupted with sound

      every time it was breached.

      All those stones planted

      in that pressurized dark

      at the bottom of the pond,

      the temperature dropping,

      the water beginning to ice.

      When the first stone hit

      and didn’t sink

      they stopped their throwing

      to observe the stone

      still with them in the silent air.

      2

      Meanwhile, indiscernibly,

      the water was draining

      through a buried system

      of pipes. They tossed their stones

      onto the ice; each skittered

      to an unreachable place.

      That long winter,

      the ice covered with stones

      kept lowering—until at last

      it rested on the mud

      and the stones they’d thrown

      those months ago. Then

      the sun began to rise,

      and the ice began to melt,

      and it was spring.

      For my daughter: these images,

      these trenches of script. She keeps

      reaching to pull them

      from the page, as if the book

      were an opened cabinet;

      every time, the page

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