After Marie Howe
This morning I wake and find
your poem waiting like a newspaper
in the driveway.
I’m overcome with nostalgia
for a life I’ve lived but never known.
When the ratio of nothingness
to a single aspiration was infinity,
compressed in a black palm
of waiting, before Maria Popova’s
octopus of spacetime breathed
its first second,
there all of us were, no boundaries,
no brilliance, no hubris, no ghosts,
no wars, no joy, no death,
we pulsed in an anxious is,
none of us in need of laws
or popcorn or water or air.
The borderless land was us,
not cellular but energy,
not flesh but light.
Somewhere in the busy-ness
of that beginning was Hawkins,
Maria, you, me, all the languages
of the universe, and your poem
glowing like this monitor
spilling light upon my face.
—
Terry Jude Miller is a twice Pushcart Prize-nominated poet from Houston. He received the 2018 Catherine Case Lubbe Manuscript Prize for his book, The Drawn Cat’s Dream. His work has been published in the Southern Poetry Anthology, The Lily Poetry Review, The Comstock Review, and The Oakland Review and in scores of other publications. He formerly served as 1st Vice Chancellor of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies.
